This document aims to be a self-contained, mathematically precise overview of transformer architectures and algorithms (*not* results). It covers what transformers are, how they are trained, what they are used for, their key architectural components, and a preview of the most prominent models. The reader is assumed to be familiar with basic ML terminology and simpler neural network architectures such as MLPs.

Trained machine learning models are increasingly used to perform high-impact tasks in areas such as law enforcement, medicine, education, and employment. In order to clarify the intended use cases of machine learning models and minimize their usage in contexts for which they are not well suited, we recommend that released models be accompanied by documentation detailing their performance characteristics. In this paper, we propose a framework that we call model cards, to encourage such transparent model reporting. Model cards are short documents accompanying trained machine learning models that provide benchmarked evaluation in a variety of conditions, such as across different cultural, demographic, or phenotypic groups (e.g., race, geographic location, sex, Fitzpatrick skin type) and intersectional groups (e.g., age and race, or sex and Fitzpatrick skin type) that are relevant to the intended application domains. Model cards also disclose the context in which models are intended to be used, details of the performance evaluation procedures, and other relevant information. While we focus primarily on human-centered machine learning models in the application fields of computer vision and natural language processing, this framework can be used to document any trained machine learning model. To solidify the concept, we provide cards for two supervised models: One trained to detect smiling faces in images, and one trained to detect toxic comments in text. We propose model cards as a step towards the responsible democratization of machine learning and related AI technology, increasing transparency into how well AI technology works. We hope this work encourages those releasing trained machine learning models to accompany model releases with similar detailed evaluation numbers and other relevant documentation.

Available:

https://openai.com/blog/whisper/

We study the capabilities of speech processing systems trained simply to predict large amounts of transcripts of audio on the internet. When scaled to 680,000 hours of multilingual and multitask supervision, the resulting models generalize well to standard benchmarks and are often competitive with prior fully supervised results but in a zero- shot transfer setting without the need for any fine- tuning. When compared to humans, the models approach their accuracy and robustness. We are releasing models and inference code to serve as a foundation for further work on robust speech processing.

**

You Will Learn Python!

**

Zed Shaw has perfected the world's best system for learning Python. Follow it and you will succeed-just like the hundreds of thousands of beginners Zed has taught to date! You bring the discipline, commitment, and persistence; the author supplies everything else.

In *Learn Python the Hard Way, Third Edition,* you'll learn Python by working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Read them. Type their code precisely. (No copying and pasting!) Fix your mistakes. Watch the programs run. As you do, you'll learn how software works; what good programs look like; how to read, write, and think about code; and how to find and fix your mistakes using tricks professional programmers use. Most importantly, you'll learn the following, which you need to start writing excellent Python software of your own:

• Installing a complete Python environment
• Organizing and writing code
• Basic mathematics
• Variables
• Strings and text
• Interacting with users
• Working with files
• Looping and logic
• Data structures using lists and dictionaries
• Program design
• Object-oriented programming
• Inheritance and composition
• Modules, classes, and objects
• Python packaging
• Debugging
• Automated testing
• Basic game development
• Basic web development

*

It'll be hard at first. But soon, you'll just get it-and that will feel great!

*

This tutorial will reward you for every minute you put into it. Soon, you'll know one of the world's most powerful, popular programming languages. You'll be a Python programmer.

Watch Zed, too! The accompanying DVD contains 5+ hours of passionate, powerful teaching: a complete Python video course!

**

50 Basic & Intermediate Tips & Tricks

Available from www.tangowithdjango.com

If you want to learn how to program, working with Python is an excellent way to start. This hands-on guide takes you through the language a step at a time, beginning with basic programming concepts before moving on to functions, recursion, data structures, and object-oriented design. This second edition and its supporting code have been updated for Python 3.

Through exercises in each chapter, you’ll try out programming concepts as you learn them. Think Python is ideal for students at the high school or college level, as well as self-learners, home-schooled students, and professionals who need to learn programming basics. Beginners just getting their feet wet will learn how to start with Python in a browser.

• Start with the basics, including language syntax and semantics
• Get a clear definition of each programming concept
• Learn about values, variables, statements, functions, and data structures in a logical progression
• Discover how to work with files and databases
• Understand objects, methods, and object-oriented programming
• Use debugging techniques to fix syntax, runtime, and semantic errors
• Explore interface design, data structures, and GUI-based programs through case studies

Two Scoops of Django 1.11 Now Available!

Search for Two Scoops of Django 1.11 to find and purchase the latest edition.

Two Scoops of Django: Best Practices For Django 1.8 is full of more material that will help you with your Django projects.

We'll introduce you to various tips, tricks, patterns, code snippets, and techniques that we've picked up over the years.

We have put thousands of hours into the third edition of the book, writing and revising its material to include significant improvements and new material based on feedback from previous editions.

Table of Contents

• Chapter 1: Coding Style
• Chapter 2: The Optimal Django Environment Setup
• Chapter 3: How To Lay Out Django Projects
• Chapter 4: Fundamentals of Django App Design
• Chapter 5: Settings and Requirements Files
• Chapter 6: Model Best Practices
• Chapter 7: Queries and the Database Layer
• Chapter 8: Function- and Class-Based Views
• Chapter 9: Best Practices for Function-Based Views
• Chapter 10: Best Practices for Class-Based Views
• Chapter 11: Form Fundamentals
• Chapter 12: Common Patterns for Forms
• Chapter 13: Templates: Best Practices
• Chapter 14: Template Tags and Filters
• Chapter 15: Django Templates and Jinja2
• Chapter 16: Building REST APIs
• Chapter 17: Consuming REST APIs
• Chapter 18: Tradeoffs of Replacing Core Components
• Chapter 19: Working With the Django Admin
• Chapter 20: Dealing with the User Model
• Chapter 21: Django's Secret Sauce: Third-Party Packages
• Chapter 22: Testing Chapter of Doom!
• Chapter 23: Documentation: Be Obsessed
• Chapter 24: Finding and Reducing Bottlenecks
• Chapter 25: Asynchronous Task Queues
• Chapter 26: Security Best Practices
• Chapter 27: Logging: Tips and Tools
• Chapter 28: Signals: Use Cases and Avoidance Techniques
• Chapter 29: What About Those Random Utilities?
• Chapter 30: Deployment: Platforms as a Service
• Chapter 31: Deploying Django Projects
• Chapter 29: Identical Environments: The Holy Grail
• Chapter 32: Continuous Integration
• Chapter 33: The Art of Debugging
• Chapter 34: Where and How to Ask Django Questions
• Chapter 35: Closing Thoughts
• Appendix A: Packages Mentioned In This Book
• Appendix B: Troubleshooting
• Appendix C: Additional Resources
• Appendix D: Internationalization and Localization
• Appendix E: Settings Alternatives
• Appendix F: Working with Python 3

What is everyone saying about Two Scoops of Django?

• I read the first edition cover to cover. The second one raises the bar again. It's pedagogical, entertaining, and thoughtful. -- Aymeric Augustin, Django core developer.
• A single read-through of Two Scoops of Django gave me so many lightbulbs and tips; I had to go back for a second helping. -- Lynn Root, Spotify engineer, PSF Director, and PyLadies ambassador.
• Make sure you have your favorite project next to you while reading. You'll be doing some rewriting. -- Bryan Veloso, GitHubber, PyCon PH Keynote Speaker
• You know those lessons you learn when projects blow up in your face? This book contains several projects worth of such lessons. -- Lennart Regebro, author of "Porting to Python 3"
• This is the book I wished had existed and I could have read when I started to really build Django projects. -- Barry Morrison, Linux systems engineer and Django developer

You Will Learn Python 3!

Zed Shaw has perfected the world’s best system for learning Python 3. Follow it and you will succeed—just like the millions of beginners Zed has taught to date! You bring the discipline, commitment, and persistence; the author supplies everything else.

In Learn Python 3 the Hard Way, you’ll learn Python by working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Read them. Type their code precisely. (No copying and pasting!) Fix your mistakes. Watch the programs run. As you do, you’ll learn how a computer works; what good programs look like; and how to read, write, and think about code. Zed then teaches you even more in 5+ hours of video where he shows you how to break, fix, and debug your code—live, as he’s doing the exercises.

• Install a complete Python environment
• Organize and write code
• Fix and break code
• Basic mathematics
• Variables
• Strings and text
• Interact with users
• Work with files
• Looping and logic
• Data structures using lists and dictionaries
• Program design
• Object-oriented programming
• Inheritance and composition
• Modules, classes, and objects
• Python packaging
• Automated testing
• Basic game development
• Basic web development

It’ll be hard at first. But soon, you’ll just get it—and that will feel great! This course will reward you for every minute you put into it. Soon, you’ll know one of the world’s most powerful, popular programming languages. You’ll be a Python programmer.

This Book Is Perfect For

• Total beginners with zero programming experience
• Junior developers who know one or two languages
• Returning professionals who haven’t written code in years
• Seasoned professionals looking for a fast, simple, crash course in Python 3

.

This latest edition of The Definitive Guide to Django is updated for Django 1.1, and, with the forward–compatibility guarantee that Django now provides, should serve as the ultimate tutorial and reference for this popular framework for years to come.

Django, the Python–based equivalent to Ruby’s Rails web development framework, is one of the hottest topics in web development today. Lead developer Jacob Kaplan–Moss and Django creator Adrian Holovaty show you how they use this framework to create award–winning web sites by guiding you through the creation of a web application reminiscent of ChicagoCrime.org.

The Definitive Guide to Django is broken into three parts, with the first introducing Django fundamentals such as installation and configuration, and creating the components that together power a Django–driven web site. The second part delves into the more sophisticated features of Django, including outputting non–HTML content such as RSS feeds and PDFs, caching, and user management. The appendixes serve as a detailed reference to Django’s many configuration options and commands.

What you’ll learn

• The first half of this book explains in depth how to build web applications using Django including the basics of dynamic web pages, the Django templating system interacting with databases, and web forms.
• The second half of this book discusses higher-level concepts such as caching, security, and how to deploy Django.
• The appendixes form a reference for the commands and configurations available in Django.

Who this book is for

Anyone who wants to use the powerful Django framework to build dynamic web sites quickly and easily.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction to Django
2. Getting Started
3. Views and URLconfs
4. Templates
5. Models
6. The Django Admin Site
7. Forms
8. Advanced Views and URLconfs
9. Advanced Templates
10. Advanced Models
11. Generic Views
12. Deploying Django
13. Generating Non-HTML Content
14. Sessions, Users, and Registration
15. Caching
16. django.contrib
17. Middleware
18. Integrating with Legacy Databases and Applications
19. Internationalization
20. Security

About the Author

Adrian Holovaty , a web developer and journalist, is one of the creators and core developers of Django. He works at WashingtonPost.com, where he builds database web applications and does "journalism as computer programming." Previously, he was lead developer for World Online in Lawrence, Kansas, where Django was created. When not working on Django improvements, Adrian hacks on side projects for the public good, such as ChicagoCrime.org, which won the 2005 Batten Award for Innovations in Journalism. He lives in Chicago and maintains a weblog at www.Holovaty.com.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss is one of the lead developers of Django. At his day job, he's the lead developer for the Lawrence Journal-World, a locally owned newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas, where Django was developed. At the Journal-World, Jacob hacks on a number of sites including lawrence.com, LJWorld.com, and KUsports.com, and he is continually embarrassed by the multitude of media awards those sites win. In his spare time—what little of it there is—he fancies himself a chef.

Deep Learning

Deep learning is making waves. At the time of this writing (March 2016), Google’s AlghaGo program just beat 9-dan professional Go player Lee Sedol at the game of Go, a Chinese board game.

Experts in the field of Artificial Intelligence thought we were 10 years away from achieving a victory against a top professional Go player, but progress seems to have accelerated!

While deep learning is a complex subject, it is not any more difficult to learn than any other machine learning algorithm. I wrote this book to introduce you to the basics of neural networks. You will get along fine with undergraduate-level math and programming skill.

All the materials in this book can be downloaded and installed for free. We will use the Python programming language, along with the numerical computing library Numpy. I will also show you in the later chapters how to build a deep network using Theano and TensorFlow, which are libraries built specifically for deep learning and can accelerate computation by taking advantage of the GPU.

Unlike other machine learning algorithms, deep learning is particularly powerful because it automatically learns features. That means you don’t need to spend your time trying to come up with and test “kernels” or “interaction effects” - something only statisticians love to do. Instead, we will let the neural network learn these things for us. Each layer of the neural network learns a different abstraction than the previous layers. For example, in image classification, the first layer might learn different strokes, and in the next layer put the strokes together to learn shapes, and in the next layer put the shapes together to form facial features, and in the next layer have a high level representation of faces.

On top of all this, deep learning is known for winning its fair share Kaggle contests. These are machine learning contests that are open to anyone in the world who are allowed to use any machine learning technique they want. Deep learning is that powerful.

Do you want a gentle introduction to this “dark art”, with practical code examples that you can try right away and apply to your own data? Then this book is for you.

Who is this book NOT for?

Deep Learning and Neural Networks are usually taught at the upper-year undergraduate level. That should give you some idea of the type of knowledge you need to understand this kind of material.

You absolutely need exposure to calculus to understand deep learning, no matter how simple the instructor makes things. Linear algebra would help. I will assume familiarity with Python (although it is an easy language to pick up). You will need to have some concept of machine learning. If you know about algorithms like logistic regression already, this book is perfect for you. If not, you might want to check out my “prerequisites” book, at: http://amzn.com/B01D7GDRQ2

On the other hand, this book is more like a casual primer than a dry textbook. If you are looking for material on more advanced topics, like LSTMs, convolutional neural networks, or reinforcement learning, I have online courses that teach this material, for example: https://www.udemy.com/deep-learning-c...

New libraries like TensorFlow are being updated constantly. This is not an encyclopedia for these libraries (as such a thing would be impossible to keep up to date). In the one (1!!!) month since the book was first published, no less than THREE new wrapper libraries for TensorFlow have been released to make coding deep networks easier.

• The #1 New York Times bestseller returns! Visit new planets, meet new adversaries, and explore a very new direction as Hazel becomes a toddler, while her family struggles to stay on their feet.
• Collects Saga #19-24.

**

From New York Times bestselling writer BRIAN K.VAUGHAN (Y: THE LAST MAN, EX MACHINA) and critically acclaimed artist FIONA STAPLES (MYSTERY SOCIETY, NORTH 40), SAGA is the sweeping tale of one young family fighting to find their place in the worlds. When two soldiers from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war fall in love, they risk everything to bring a fragile new life into a dangerous old universe. Fantasy and science fiction are wed like never before in a sexy, subversive drama for adults. This specially priced volume collects the first arc of the smash hit series The Onion A.V. Club calls "the emotional epic Hollywood wishes it could make."

Collects : Saga #1-6.

Collecting the epic second storyline of the smash hit series Entertainment Weekly called "the kind of comic you get when truly talented superstar creators are given the freedom to produce their dream comic." Thanks to her star-crossed parents Marko and Alana, newborn baby Hazel has already survived lethal assassins, rampaging armies, and alien monstrosities, but in the cold vastness of outer space, the little girl encounters her family's greatest challenge yet: the grandparents.

Collects : Saga #7-12.

The Eisner, Harvey, and Hugo Award-winning phenomenon continues, as new parents Marko and Alana travel to an alien world to visit their hero, while the family's pursuers finally close in on their targets.

Collects : Saga #13-18.

• Multiple storylines collide in this cosmos-spanning new volume. While Gwendolyn and Lying Cat risk everything to find a cure for The Will, Marko makes an uneasy alliance with Prince Robot IV to find their missing children, who are trapped on a strange world with terrifying new enemies.
• Collects Saga #25-30.

**

After a dramatic time jump, the three-time Eisner Award winner for Best Continuing Series continues to evolve, as Hazel begins the most exciting adventure of her life: kindergarten. Meanwhile, her starcrossed family learns hard lessons of their own.

Collects: Saga #31-36.

From the worldwide bestselling team of Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan, “The War for Phang” is an epic, self-contained Saga event! Finally reunited with her ever-expanding family, Hazel travels to a war-torn comet that Wreath and Landfall have been battling over for ages. New friendships are forged and others are lost forever in this action-packed volume about families, combat and the refugee experience.

Collects: Saga #37-42.

After the traumatic events of the War for Phang, Hazel, her parents, and their surviving companions embark on a life-changing adventure at the westernmost edge of the universe.

Collects: Saga #43-48.

At long last, a deluxe hardcover of the Eisner and Hugo Award-winning SAGA is finally here!

"It's easy to run out of accolades for this superb series... The dialogue is smart, arch and always rings true, and the visuals, rendered digitally, are alluring and inventive. The Stalk, an eight-eyed, eight-limbed female bounty hunter, remains a creepy favorite." - The New York Times

At long last, a deluxe hardcover of the Hugo Award-winning Saga is finally on its way! Collecting the first three trade paperbacks (issues #1-18) of the smash-hit series, this massive edition features a striking new cover, as well as special extras, including never-before-seen sketches, script pages, and a roundtable discussion with the creators about how Saga is really made. Altogether, this hardcover contains over 500 pages for less than fifty bucks!

Written by Eisner Award-winning "Best Writer" Brian K. Vaughan ( Y: The Last Man, The Private Eye ) and drawn by Harvey Award-winning "Best Artist" Fiona Staples ( Mystery Society, North 40 ) Saga is the story of Hazel, a child born to star-crossed parents from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war. Now, Hazel's fugitive family must risk everything to find a peaceful future in a harsh universe that values destruction over creation. Fantasy and science fiction are wed like never before in a sexy, subversive drama for adults that Entertainment Weekly called, "The kind of comic you get when truly talented superstar creators are given the freedom to produce their dream book."

Collects: Saga #1-18.

The multiple Eisner Award-winning series returns with a spacefaring adventure about fake news and genuine terror. Get ready for the most shocking, most impactful SAGA storyline yet.

Collects: Saga #49-54.

A CONTEMPORARY CLASSIC CELEBRATING A DECADE OF EXCELLENCE! At long last, Hazel and her star-crossed family are finally back, and they've made some new...friends? This collection features the latest six chapters of the most epic adventure in comics, including the series' double-sized first issue back from hiatus. Collects SAGA #55-60. Romeo & Juliet meets Star Wars in this genre-blending, sci-fi/fantasy space opera about star crossed lovers from enemy worlds. An epic for mature readers, Saga follows new parents Marko and Alana as they risk everything to raise their child amidst a never-ending galactic war. A multiple award winning, critically acclaimed masterpiece and one of the most iconic, bestselling comic book series of its time. The SAGA series has sold over 6.8 million copies to date across all formats, has been translated into 20 languages, and has garnered multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards, plus a Hugo Award, British Fantasy Award, Goodreads Choice Award, Shuster Award, Inkwell Award, Ringo Award, and more. It has been featured in such mainstream media outlets as TIME, Entertainment Weekly, The Atlantic, NPR, and beyond, and has become a pop culture phenomenon.

At long last, it's finally time for the second hardcover collection of SAGA, the New York Times bestselling series praised by everyone from Alan Moore to Lin-Manuel Miranda! Created by the multiple Eisner Award-winning team of artist FIONA STAPLES (Mystery Society, North 40, Archie Comics) and writer BRIAN K. VAUGHAN (THE PRIVATE EYE, PAPER GIRLS, WE STAND ON GUARD), SAGA BOOK TWO continues the action-packed education of Hazel, a child born to star-crossed parents from opposite sides of a never-ending galactic war.

Collecting 18 issues of the smash-hit comic, this massive edition features a striking original cover from Fiona Staples, as well as a brand-new gallery of exclusive, never-before-seen SAGA artwork from legendary creators including CLIFF CHIANG, PIA GUERRA, FAITH ERIN HICKS, KARL KERSCHL, JASON LATOUR, SEAN GORDON MURPHY, STEVE SKROCE, and MORE!

Collects: Saga #19-36.

At long last, it's finally time for the THIRD massive hardcover collection of SAGA, the critically acclaimed sci-fi/fantasy series from the multiple Eisner Award-winning team of artist FIONA STAPLES and writer BRIAN K. VAUGHAN. Collecting 18 of the most shocking and impactful issues from the epic tale of Hazel and her star-crossed parents, this deluxe edition features a striking, all-new original cover from FIONA STAPLES, as well as exclusive, never-before-seen extras.

Collects: Saga #37-54.

Hilariously picaresque, epic in scope, alive with the poetry and vigor of the American people, Mark Twain's story about a young boy and his journey down the Mississippi was the first great novel to speak in a truly American voice. Influencing subsequent generations of writers -- from Sherwood Anderson to Twain's fellow Missourian, T.S. Eliot, from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner to J.D. Salinger -- "Huckleberry Finn," like the river which flows through its pages, is one of the great sources which nourished and still nourishes the literature of America.

Tolstoy's epic masterpiece captures with unprecedented immediacy the broad sweep of life during the Napoleonic wars and the brutal invasion of Russia. Balls and soires, the burning of Moscow, the intrigues of statesmen and generals, scenes of violent battles, the quiet moments of everyday life--all in a work whose extraordinary imaginative power has never been surpassed. The Maudes' translation of Tolstoy's epic masterpiece has long been considered the best English version, and now for the first time it has been revised to bring it fully into line with modern approaches to the text. French passages are restored, Anglicization of Russian names removed, and outmoded expressions updated. A new introduction by Amy Mandelker considers the novel's literary and historical context, the nature of the work, and Tolstoy's artistic and philosophical aims. New, expanded notes provide historical background and identifications, as well as insight into Russian life and society.

Contents: A Day in the Country; Old Age; Kashtanka; Enemies; On the Way; Vanka; La Cigale; Grief; An Inadvertence; The Black Monk; The Kiss; In Exile; A Work of Art; Dreams; A Woman's Kingdom; The Doctor; A Trifling Occurrence; The Hollow; After the Theater; The Runaway; Vierochka; The Steppe; Rothschild's Fiddle.

Considered by some to be the greatest novel ever written, Anna Karenina is Tolstoy's classic tale of love and adultery set against the backdrop of high society in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. A rich and complex masterpiece, the novel charts the disastrous course of a love affair between Anna, a beautiful married woman, and Count Vronsky, a wealthy army officer. Tolstoy seamlessly weaves together the lives of dozens of characters, and in doing so captures a breathtaking tapestry of late-nineteenth-century Russian society.

When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation. With an introduction by Martin Amis.

Hamlet is Shakespeare’s most popular, and most puzzling, play. It follows the form of a “revenge tragedy,” in which the hero, Hamlet, seeks vengeance against his father’s murderer, his uncle Claudius, now the king of Denmark. Much of its fascination, however, lies in its uncertainties. Among them: What is the Ghost—Hamlet’s father demanding justice, a tempting demon, an angelic messenger? Does Hamlet go mad, or merely pretend to? Once he is sure that Claudius is a murderer, why does he not act? Was his mother, Gertrude, unfaithful to her husband or complicit in his murder?

Recognized as one of the major literary works of the twentieth-century, Marcel Proust's monumental seven-volume novel brings together memories of childhood and Parisian society before and during the First World War.

A sprawling work set in a provincial English town, Middlemarch boasts a large cast of characters whose stories interweave against a backdrop of political upheaval.

Instead of choosing to wed a wealthy landowner and settle for a comfortable life, Dorothea Brooke decides to marry Edward Casaubon—a dull scholar who is her senior by a few decades. Dorothea hopes the union will afford her with the opportunity to share in her husband’s intellectual pursuits, but even her best efforts can’t save the disastrous marriage. Meanwhile, idealistic doctor Tertius Lydgate has progressive ideas about the medical field, and he believes the village of Middlemarch is the place that will embrace his beliefs. But when he weds Rosamond Vincy, the mayor’s beautiful daughter, his ideals come into stark contrast with his new bride’s materialism and vanity, dooming their marriage from the start.

Lastly, Rosamond's brother, Fred, is reluctantly destined for the Church. But his childhood sweetheart Mary Garth refuses to accept him until he settles into a more suitable career and one that interests him. But when circumstances lead to Fred losing a sizeable fortune that sets off a calamitous turn of events, he must reevaluate the choices he has made.

Emma is bored and wants excitement and makes a complete mess of her life. In the process she destroys the life of her very provincial husband who also happens to be a good man. The story is tragic and at times frustrating but well worth reading.

After marrying Charles Bovary, an ordinary country doctor, Emma Rouault hopes to have the adventurous life of passion and intrigue that she reads about in books. However, she is disappointed with her husband and her simple life. It is anything but the romantic excitement she longs for. In her desire to fulfill her dreams she travels down a winding path of adultery and deception.

We propose Make-A-Video -- an approach for directly translating the tremendous recent progress in Text-to-Image (T2I) generation to Text-to-Video (T2V). Our intuition is simple: learn what the world looks like and how it is described from paired text-image data, and learn how the world moves from unsupervised video footage. Make-A-Video has three advantages: (1) it accelerates training of the T2V model (it does not need to learn visual and multimodal representations from scratch), (2) it does not require paired text-video data, and (3) the generated videos inherit the vastness (diversity in aesthetic, fantastical depictions, etc.) of today's image generation models. We design a simple yet effective way to build on T2I models with novel and effective spatial-temporal modules. First, we decompose the full temporal U-Net and attention tensors and approximate them in space and time. Second, we design a spatial temporal pipeline to generate high resolution and frame rate videos with a video decoder, interpolation model and two super resolution models that can enable various applications besides T2V. In all aspects, spatial and temporal resolution, faithfulness to text, and quality, Make-A-Video sets the new state-of-the-art in text-to-video generation, as determined by both qualitative and quantitative measures.

Large text-to-image models achieved a remarkable leap in the evolution of AI, enabling high-quality and diverse synthesis of images from a given text prompt. However, these models lack the ability to mimic the appearance of subjects in a given reference set and synthesize novel renditions of them in different contexts. In this work, we present a new approach for "personalization" of text-to-image diffusion models (specializing them to users' needs). Given as input just a few images of a subject, we fine-tune a pretrained text-to-image model (Imagen, although our method is not limited to a specific model) such that it learns to bind a unique identifier with that specific subject. Once the subject is embedded in the output domain of the model, the unique identifier can then be used to synthesize fully-novel photorealistic images of the subject contextualized in different scenes. By leveraging the semantic prior embedded in the model with a new autogenous class-specific prior preservation loss, our technique enables synthesizing the subject in diverse scenes, poses, views, and lighting conditions that do not appear in the reference images. We apply our technique to several previously-unassailable tasks, including subject recontextualization, text-guided view synthesis, appearance modification, and artistic rendering (all while preserving the subject's key features).

We introduce Jukebox, a model that generates music with singing in the raw audio domain. We tackle the long context of raw audio using a multi-scale VQ-VAE to compress it to discrete codes, and modeling those using autoregressive Transformers. We show that the combined model at scale can generate high-fidelity and diverse songs with coherence up to multiple minutes. We can condition on artist and genre to steer the musical and vocal style, and on unaligned lyrics to make the singing more controllable.

WINNER OF THREE EISNER AWARDS As Yorick Brown, the last man on Earth, begins to make his way across the country to California, he and his companions are forced to make an unscheduled stop in Marrisville, Ohio—a small town with a big secret.

Collects Y: The Last Man issues #6-10

The adventures of Yorick Brown continue in Y: THE LAST MAN: ONE SMALL STEP, collecting issues #11-17.

A Russian Soyuz capsule is coming down from the International Space Station carrying three passengers: one woman and two men. Could this be the end of Yorick's tenure as last living male?

As the Last Man on Earth and his companions continue to head West, the story takes a detour into the psychological.

In the care of a fellow Culper Ring member, Yorick Brown is forced to confront his tremendous feelings of survivor guilt that lead him to constantly put his life in danger. Once on the road again, the group runs up against a literal roadblock in Arizona, where the female remains of the Sons of Arizona militia have cut the interstate to keep out any vestiges of the U.S. government.

Yorick Brown, the last man on Earth, finally makes it to San Francisco where his unbalanced sister, Hero, finds him seemingly succumbing to the male-killing plague after losing his still-unused engagement ring to the burqa-clad agents of the Setauket Ring. But is the ring really the key to his survival? And what does it have to do with the mysterious Amulet of Helene, which the Setauket leader is determined to take from Agent 355 by any means necessary. Collects issues #24-31.

More than two years after the unexplained plague killed every other male mammal on the planet, the two exceptions - aspiring escape artist Yorick Brown and his pet monkey Ampersand - have traveled across the remains of the U.S. with biochemist Dr. Allison Mann and goverment operative Agent 355 to Dr. Mann's lab in San Francisco, where she managed to finally isolate the source of their immunity.

Unfortunately, that source is within Ampersand's body, which was last seen disappearing under the arm of a mysterious Japanese mercenary. Now, accompanied by 355 and Dr. Mann, the last man on Earth has embarked on a new and even more hazardous journey - following Ampersand's trail across the Pacific, where danger threatens from below as well as above the waves.

Collects issues 32-36

The saga of Yorick Brown, the last man on Earth, continues in PAPER DOLLS. In addition to catching up on the adventures of Yorick's monkey Ampersand (whose body holds the key to stopping the male-killing plague) and telling the origin of Agent 355, PAPER DOLLS chronicles Yorick and 355's search for Yorick's fiancee Beth in Australia -- a search that yields a large dose of unwanted publicity for the Last Man, and deadly consequences for those he cares for!

Collects Y: The Last Man issues #37-#42

WINNER OF THREE EISNER AWARDS. KIMONO DRAGONS brings the hunt for Ampersand-the monkey who could unlock the mystery of the male-killing plague- to its explosive climax, as the last man on Earth and his companions finally reach Japan and discover the truth behind Ampersand's abduction. Collects issues #43-48 of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's award-winning Vertigo series.

The saga of Yorick Brown, an unemployed and unmotivated slacker who discovers he is the only male left in the world after a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome. Accompanied by his mischievous monkey, Ampersand, and the mysterious Agent 355, Yorick embarks on a transcontinental journey to find his long-lost girlfriend and discover why he is the last man on earth.

This volume of the critically acclaimed series features Yorick and Agent 355 preparing for their ultimate quest to reunite the last man with his lost love, while the person, people or thing behind the disaster that wiped out half of humanity is revealed!

WINNER OF THREE EISNER AWARDS

Featured in THE NEW YORK TIMES and on NPR, Y: THE LAST MAN is the gripping saga of Yorick Brown, an unemployed and unmotivated slacker who discovers he is the only male left in the world after a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome. Accompanied by his mischievous monkey, Ampersand, and the mysterious Agent 355, Yorick embarks on a transcontinental journey to find his long-lost girlfriend and discover why he is the last man on earth.

Yorick Brown's long journey through an Earth populated only by women comes to a dramatic, unexpected conclusion in this final volume. Collects issues #55-60 of Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra's award-winning Vertigo series.

"Y" is none other than unemployed escape artist Yorick Brown (his father was a Shakespeare buff), and he's seemingly the only male human left alive after a mysterious plague kills all Y-chromosome carriers on earth.

But why are he and his faithful companion, the often testy male monkey Ampersand, still alive? He sets out to find the answer (and his girlfriend), while running from angry female Republicans (now running the government), Amazon wannabes that include his own sister (seemingly brainwashed), and other threats.

V must come to a decision about Evey, but it's one his young compatriot might not like. Plus, V breaks into a television station with an important message.

Evey Hammond has been taken prisoner! Thrown into a cell and questioned and tortured relentlessly, Evey must search for a way to keep herself alive and her spirit itself from shattering.

Evey feels betrayed by her involvement in Bishop Lilliman's murder and gives V an ultimatum. Meanwhile, the Fingermen come closer to unlocking the mystery of V's identity!

Evey is given a choice: confess and work with her captors or face death. It all leads to the truth of her abduction and the beginning of the final chapters of V's saga!

V continues his crusade against the tyrannical government of Great Britain, bombing another prominent building and attacking a Bishop. As Evey grows more comfortable with the vigilante, she falls deeper into his plot.

The final issue of writer Alan Moore and artist David Lloyd's acclaimed series! One may be able to kill a person, but an idea is bulletproof...

In a post-nuclear world, Great Britain has emerged as a Fascist state. When young Evey Hammond is saved by a mysterious masked stranger, she is pulled into his quest to fight back and overthrow the government.

The clone assassin has been played long enough–
now it’s more than a game.

Bred to kill, Agent 47 is The Agency’s most valuable assassin. So when a competing murder-for-hire organization decides to destroy The Agency, the first person they target for elimination is Agent 47. Tasking someone to off the best hitman in the business is one thing; getting the job done is another. When the attempt falls short, Agent 47 is ordered to track down and kill the culprit who is feeding vital information about The Agency to its enemies.

Agent 47 must follow a bloody trail halfway around the world, fight his way through the streets of Fez, Morocco, and battle slavers deep inside Chad. Then he will discover a shattering truth: If he fails at his mission, the price he’ll pay will be far greater than his own life....

47 and his handler, Diana Burnwood, are a team responsible for some of the most ruthless, efficient and untraceable assassinations across the globe. But before they were operatives of the shadowy International Contracts Association, 47 and Burnwood were on their own separate paths in life - streets lined with blood, bullets and revenge. As 14-year-old Diana begins a mission to track down the people who killed her parents, 47 is struggling to free himself and his friend, 6, from the mysterious Institute which has bred them as killers since they were kids. With a story that stretches from the heartland of America to the Berlin Wall, Lone Wolves will trace the birth of the legendary Hitman and the secret past of the woman behind him who pulls the string and knows just how hard taking a life truly is.

In 1941, Astounding Science Fiction magazine published a short story by a little-known writer named Isaac Asimov. The story was called "Nightfall", and many years later it has long been recognized as a classic, its author a legend. Now, the Gran Master of Science Fiction teams with Robert Silverberg, one of the field's top award-winning authors, to explore and expand an apocalyptic tale that is more spellbinding today than ever before -- Nightfall: The Novel.

Imagine living on a planet with six suns that never experiences Darkness. Imagine never having seen the Stars. Then, one by one the suns start to set, gradually leading into Darkness for the first time ever. Kalgash is a world on the edge of chaos, torn between the madness of religious fanaticism and the unyielding rationalism of scientists. Lurking beneath it all is a collective, instinctual fear of the Darkness. For Kalgash knows only the perpetual light of day; to its inhabitants, a gathering twilight portends unspeakable horror. And only a handful of people on the planet are prepared to face the truth, their six suns are setting all at once for the first time in over two thousand years, signaling the end of civilization as it explodes in the awesome splendor of Nightfall.

Encompassing the psychology of disaster, the tenacity of the human spirit, and, ultimately, the regenerative power of hope, Nightfall is a tale rich in character and suspense that only the unique collaboration of Isaac Asimov and Robert Silverberg could create.

Het portret van Dorian Gray (Engelstalige titel The Picture of Dorian Gray) is de enige gepubliceerde roman van Oscar Wilde. Hij werd voor het eerst uitgebracht in Engeland in 1890. Een Nederlandse vertaling door Elisabeth Couperus-Baud verscheen in 1893. Haar echtgenoot Louis Couperus had het boek rechtstreeks van Oscar Wilde ontvangen en zij was er diep van onder de indruk.

Now in paperback, the New York Times bestseller by one of rock's most provocative figures Scar Tissue is Anthony Kiedis's searingly honest memoir of a life spent in the fast lane.

In 1983, four self-described "knuckleheads" burst out of the mosh-pitted mosaic of the neo-punk rock scene in L.A. with their own unique brand of cosmic hardcore mayhem funk. Over twenty years later, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, against all odds, have become one of the most successful bands in the world. Though the band has gone through many incarnations, Anthony Kiedis, the group's lyricist and dynamic lead singer, has been there for the whole roller-coaster ride. Whether he's recollecting the influence of the beautiful, strong women who have been his muses, or retracing a journey that has included appearances as diverse as a performance before half a million people at Woodstock or an audience of one at the humble compound of the exiled Dalai Lama, Kiedis shares a compelling story about the price of success and excess.

Scar Tissue is a story of dedication and debauchery, of intrigue and integrity, of recklessness and redemption--a story that could only have come out of the world of rock.

Here is Oscar Wilde's most brilliant tour de force, a witty and buoyant comedy of manners that has delighted millions in countless productions since its first performance in London's St. James' Theatre on February 14, 1895." The Importance of Being Earnest" is celebrated not only for the lighthearted ingenuity of its plot, but for its inspired dialogue, rich with scintillating epigrams still savored by all who enjoy artful conversation.
From the play's effervescent beginnings in Algernon Moncrieff's London flat to its hilarious denouement in the drawing room of Jack Worthing's country manor in Hertfordshire, this comic masterpiece keeps audiences breathlessly anticipating a new bon mot or a fresh twist of plot moment to moment. A selection of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.

What was a nice Eton boy like Eric Blair doing in scummy slums instead of being upwardly mobile at Oxford or Cambridge? Living Down and Out in Paris and London , repudiating respectable imperialist society, and reinventing himself as George Orwell. His 1933 debut book (ostensibly a novel, but overwhelmingly autobiographical) was rejected by that elitist publisher T. S. Eliot, perhaps because its close-up portrait of lowlife was too pungent for comfort.

In Paris, Orwell lived in verminous rooms and washed dishes at the overpriced "Hotel X," in a remarkably filthy, 110-degree kitchen. He met "eccentric people – people who have fallen into solitary, half-mad grooves of life and given up trying to be normal or decent." Though Orwell's tone is that of an outraged reformer, it's surprising how entertaining many of his adventures are: gnawing poverty only enlivens the imagination, and the wild characters he met often swindled each other and themselves. The wackiest tale involves a miser who ate cats, wore newspapers for underwear, invested 6,000 francs in cocaine, and hid it in a face-powder tin when the cops raided. They had to free him, because the apparently controlled substance turned out to be face powder instead of cocaine.

In London, Orwell studied begging with a crippled expert named Bozo, a great storyteller and philosopher. Orwell devotes a chapter to the fine points of London guttersnipe slang. Years later, he would put his lexical bent to work by inventing Newspeak, and draw on his down-and-out experience to evoke the plight of the Proles in 1984. Though marred by hints of unexamined anti-Semitism, Orwell's debut remains, as The Nation put it, "the most lucid portrait of poverty in the English language." --Tim Appelo

Released by Louisiana State University Press in 1980, A Confederacy of Dunces is nothing short of a publishing phenomenon. Rejected by countless publishers and submitted by the author's mother years after his suicide, the book won the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Today there are almost two million copies in print worldwide in eighteen languages. Now, for the first time, John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece is available in a large print edition. Toole's lunatic and sage novel introduces one of the most memorable characters in American literature, Ignatius Reilly, whom Walker Percy dubs "slob extraordinaire, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one." Set in New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces outswifts Swift, one of whose essays gives the book its title. As its characters burst into life, they leave the region and literature forever changed by their presence -- Ignatius and his mother; Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant at Levi Pants; inept, wan Patrolman Mancuso; Darlene, the Bourbon Street stripper with a penchant for poultry; Jones the jivecat in spaceage dark glasses.

Included here is the introduction that writer and New Orleans resident Andrei Codrescu composed for the book's twentieth anniversary. Set in oversized type for ease in reading, the large print edition will gratify both first-timers seeking to discover this modern-day classic and longtime afficionados wishing to reread a favorite novel.

De brieven van Vincent van Gogh behoren tot de beste kunstenaarsbrieven die ooit zijn geschreven. Deze editie herstelt verschillende passages die in vorige edities waren weggelaten. Zij bevat waar mogelijk complete brieven, aangevuld met teksten van Ronald de Leeuw, die niet alleen ingaan op Van Goghs gedachtewereld, maar ook op de uiterlijke aspecten van zijn leven. De brieven tonen zijn religieuze worstelingen aan, zijn fascinatie voor de Franse Revolutie, zijn zoektocht naar liefde en zijn betrokkenheid bij filantropische kwesties. Het populaire beeld van Van Gogh als een antisociale gek en martelaar blijkt onhoudbaar. Uit deze brieven komt hij naar voren als een man van grote geestelijke diepgang. Wie De brieven van Vincent van Gogh leest, komt oog in oog te staan met een van de meest exemplarische figuren uit de moderne westerse cultuur.

De brieven van Vincent van Gogh behoren tot de beste kunstenaarsbrieven die ooit zijn geschreven. Deze editie herstelt verschillende passages die in vorige edities waren weggelaten. Zij bevat waar mogelijk complete brieven, aangevuld met teksten van Ronald de Leeuw, die niet alleen ingaan op Van Goghs gedachtewereld, maar ook op de uiterlijke aspecten van zijn leven. De brieven tonen zijn religieuze worstelingen aan, zijn fascinatie voor de Franse Revolutie, zijn zoektocht naar liefde en zijn betrokkenheid bij filantropische kwesties. Het populaire beeld van Van Gogh als een antisociale gek en martelaar blijkt onhoudbaar. Uit deze brieven komt hij naar voren als een man van grote geestelijke diepgang. Wie De brieven van Vincent van Gogh leest, komt oog in oog te staan met een van de meest exemplarische figuren uit de moderne westerse cultuur.

De brieven van Vincent van Gogh behoren tot de beste kunstenaarsbrieven die ooit zijn geschreven. Deze editie herstelt verschillende passages die in vorige edities waren weggelaten. Zij bevat waar mogelijk complete brieven, aangevuld met teksten van Ronald de Leeuw, die niet alleen ingaan op Van Goghs gedachtewereld, maar ook op de uiterlijke aspecten van zijn leven. De brieven tonen zijn religieuze worstelingen aan, zijn fascinatie voor de Franse Revolutie, zijn zoektocht naar liefde en zijn betrokkenheid bij filantropische kwesties. Het populaire beeld van Van Gogh als een antisociale gek en martelaar blijkt onhoudbaar. Uit deze brieven komt hij naar voren als een man van grote geestelijke diepgang. Wie De brieven van Vincent van Gogh leest, komt oog in oog te staan met een van de meest exemplarische figuren uit de moderne westerse cultuur.

De enige geautoriseerde en volledige biografie van Steve Jobs. Walter Isaacson heeft de afgelopen drie jaar exclusieve en unieke gesprekken voerde met Jobs, zijn familie en vrienden, om een beeld van de mens Steve Jobs te krijgen. Maar Isaacson heeft ook gesproken met collega"s bij Apple en met zijn concurrenten, om een beeld van de zakenman te krijgen. Wie is de man die de wereld aan zijn voeten kreeg met Apple?

Walter Isaacson is de voorzitter van het Aspen Institute. In het verleden was hij onder meer hoofdredacteur van Time Magazine en CEO van CNN. Hij schreef eerder gezaghebbende biografieen van Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger en Albert Einstein.

Turks Fruit, het hartverscheurende verhaal van de gepassioneerde maar onmogelijke liefde tussen Olga en beeldhouwer Eric, verscheen oorspronkelijk in 1969 en bracht een schok teweeg in de Nederlandse letteren. Niet alleen werden liefde, seks en dood tot zo'n pulserend en vitaal geheel gesmeed. De verfilming van Turks Fruit door Paul Verhoeven, met in de hoofdrollen Rutger Hauer en Monique van der Ven, werd uitgeroepen tot de beste Hollandse speelfilm ooit en kreeg in 1974 een oscarnominatie.

De mens is een beest, zeiden de koningen. Een zondaar, zeiden de priesters. Een egoïst, zeiden de boekhouders. Al eeuwen is de westerse cultuur doordrongen van het geloof in de verdorvenheid van de mens.

Maar wat als we het al die tijd mis hadden?

In dit boek verweeft Rutger Bregman de jongste inzichten uit de psychologie, de economie, de biologie en de archeologie. Hij neemt ons mee op een reis door de geschiedenis en geeft nieuwe antwoorden op oude vragen. Waarom veroverde juist onze soort de aarde? Hoe verklaren we onze grootste misdaden? En zijn we diep vanbinnen geneigd tot het goede of het kwade?

Adembenemend, weids en revolutionair – De meeste mensen deugen herschrijft niet alleen de geschiedenis, maar werpt ook nieuw licht op onze toekomst.

She is sent to an office building where she is tasked with watching the hidden-camera feed of an author suspected of storing contraband goods. But observing someone for hours on end isn't so easy. How will she stay awake? When can she take delivery of her favourite brand of tea? And, perhaps more importantly – how did she find herself in this situation in the first place?As she moves from job to job, writing bus adverts for shops that mysteriously disappear, and composing advice for rice cracker wrappers that generate thousands of devoted followers, it becomes increasingly apparent that she's not searching for the easiest job at all, but something altogether more meaningful..._______________'An irreverent but thoughtful voice, with light echoes of Haruki Murakami ... the book is uncannily timely ... a novel as smart as is quietly funny' - Financial Times'Polly Barton's translation skilfully captures the protagonist's dejected, anxious voice and her deadpan humour ... imaginative and unusual' - Times Literary Supplement

From one of the great thinkers and writers of our time, comes the highly anticipated final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography'
'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer on The Cost of Living

Following the international critical acclaim of The Cost of Living , this final volume of Deborah Levy's 'Living Autobiography' is an exhilarating, thought-provoking and boldly intimate meditation on home and the spectres that haunt it.

'I began to wonder what myself and all unwritten and unseen women would possess in their property portfolios at the end of their lives. Literally, her physical property and possessions, and then everything else she valued, though it might not be valued by society. What might she claim, own, discard and bequeath? Or is she the real estate, owned by patriarchy? In this sense, Real Estate is a tricky business. We rent it and buy it, sell and inherit it - but we must also knock it down.'

'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise... A brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph on The Cost of Living

'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times on The Cost of Living

Throughout her life, Elissa Washuta has been surrounded by cheap facsimiles of Native spiritual tools and occult trends, “starter witch kits” of sage, rose quartz, and tarot cards packaged together in paper and plastic. Following a decade of abuse, addiction, PTSD, and heavy-duty drug treatment for a misdiagnosis of bipolar disorder, she felt drawn to the real spirits and powers her dispossessed and discarded ancestors knew, while she undertook necessary work to find love and meaning.

In this collection of intertwined essays, she writes about land, heartbreak, and colonization, about life without the escape hatch of intoxication, and about how she became a powerful witch. She interlaces stories from her forebears with cultural artifacts from her own life— Twin Peaks , the Oregon Trail II video game, a Claymation Satan, a YouTube video of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham—to explore questions of cultural inheritance and the particular danger, as a Native woman, of relaxing into romantic love under colonial rule.

A searing and brave memoir that offers a new understanding of suicide as a distinct mental illness. As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two hospitalizations, weeks of fruitless clinical trials, the terror of submitting to ECT—and the saving call from David Foster Wallace that convinced him to try it—as well as years of fitful recovery and setback. Through a clear and haunting reckoning with the author’s own story, One Friday in April confronts the limits of our understanding of suicide. Donald Antrim’s personal insights reframe suicide—whether in thought or in action—as an illness in its own right, a unique consequence of trauma and personal isolation, rather than the choice of a depressed person. A necessary companion to William Styron’s classic? Darkness Visible, this profound, insightful work sheds light on the tragedy and mystery of suicide, offering solace that may save lives.

A transfixing novel about two unforgettable characters seeking to free themselves--one from the expectations of women in early 20th century Punjab, and the other from the weight of life in the contemporary Indian diaspora

Mehar, a young bride in rural 1929 Punjab, is trying to discover the identity of her new husband. Married to three brothers in a single ceremony, she and her now-sisters spend their days hard at work in the family's "china room," sequestered from contact with the men--except when their domineering mother-in-law, Mai, summons them to a darkened chamber at night. Curious and strong willed, Mehar tries to piece together what Mai doesn't want her to know. From beneath her veil, she studies the sounds of the men's voices, the calluses on their fingers as she serves them tea. Soon she glimpses something that seems to confirm which of the brothers is her husband, and a series of events is set in motion that will put more than one life at risk. As the early stirrings of the Indian independence movement rise around her, Mehar must weigh her own desires against the reality--and danger--of her situation.

Spiraling around Mehar's story is that of a young man who arrives at his uncle's house in Punjab in the summer of 1999, hoping to shake an addiction that has held him in its grip for more than two years. Growing up in small-town England as the son of an immigrant shopkeeper, his experiences of racism, violence, and estrangement from the culture of his birth led him to seek a dangerous form of escape. As he rides out his withdrawal at his family's ancestral home--an abandoned farmstead, its china room mysteriously locked and barred--he begins to knit himself back together, gathering strength for the journey home.

Partly inspired by award-winning author Sunjeev Sahota's family history, China Room is at once a deft exploration of how systems of power circumscribe individual lives and a deeply moving portrait of the unconquerable human capacity to resist them. At once sweeping and intimate, lush and propulsive, it ** is a stunning achievement from a contemporary master.

At the March on Washington in 1963, Josephine Baker was fifty-seven years old, well beyond her most prolific days. But in her speech she was in a mood to consider her life, her legacy, her departure from the country she was now triumphantly returning to. “I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too,” she told the crowd. Inspired by these few words, Hanif Abdurraqib has written a profound and lasting reflection on how Black performance is inextricably woven into the fabric of American culture. Each moment in every performance he examines—whether it’s the twenty-seven seconds in “Gimme Shelter” in which Merry Clayton wails the words “rape, murder,” a schoolyard fistfight, a dance marathon, or the instant in a game of spades right after the cards are dealt—has layers of resonance in Black and white cultures, the politics of American empire, and Abdurraqib’s own personal history of love, grief, and performance.

Abdurraqib writes prose brimming with jubilation and pain, infused with the lyricism and rhythm of the musicians he loves. With care and generosity, he explains the poignancy of performances big and small, each one feeling intensely familiar and vital, both timeless and desperately urgent. Filled with sharp insight, humor, and heart, A Little Devil in America exalts the Black performance that unfolds in specific moments in time and space—from midcentury Paris to the moon, and back down again to a cramped living room in Columbus, Ohio.

Born two years after her parents' only son died just hours after his birth, Kat Chow became unusually fixated with death. She worried constantly about her parents dying -- especially her mother. One morning, when Kat was nine, her mother, a vivacious and mischievous woman, casually made a morbid joke: When she eventually dies, she said laughing, she'd like to be stuffed and displayed in Kat's future apartment in order to always watch over her.

Four years later when her mother dies unexpectedly from cancer, Kat, her two older sisters, and their father are plunged into a debilitating, lonely grief. With a distinct voice that is wry and heartfelt, Kat weaves together what is part ghost story and part excavation of her family's history of loss spanning three generations and their immigration from China and Hong Kong to America and Cuba. This redemptive coming-of-age story uncovers the uncanny parallels in Kat's lineage, including the strength of sisterhood and the complicated duty of looking after parents, even after death.

Seeing Ghosts asks what it means to claim and tell your family's story: Is writing an exorcism or is it its own form of preservation? What do we owe to our families in our grief, and how does it shape us? In order to answer these questions and to understand her family's ghosts, Kat unearths their sorrow and challenges the power structures of race, class, and gender. The result is an extraordinary new contribution to the literature of grief and the American family, and a provocative and transformative meditation on who we become under the specter of loss.

Once an intimate of Mao Zedong and the nation's most celebrated poet, Ai Weiwei's father, Ai Qing, was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as "Little Siberia," where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist--and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime.

Ai Weiwei's sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his life story and that of his father, whose creativity was stifled.

At once ambitious and intimate, Ai Weiwei's 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression.

Suzanne Simard is a pioneer on the frontier of plant communication and intelligence; she's been compared to Rachel Carson, hailed as a scientist who conveys complex, technical ideas in a way that is dazzling and profound. Her work has influenced filmmakers (the Tree of Souls of James Cameron's Avatar ) and her TED talks have been viewed by more than 10 million people worldwide.

Now, in her first book, Simard brings us into her world, the intimate world of the trees, in which she brilliantly illuminates the fascinating and vital truths--that trees are not simply the source of timber or pulp, but are a complex, interdependent circle of life; that forests are social, cooperative creatures connected through underground networks by which trees communicate their vitality and vulnerabilities with communal lives not that different from our own.

Simard writes--in inspiring, illuminating, and accessible ways--how trees, living side by side for hundreds of years, have evolved, how they perceive one another, learn and adapt their behaviors, recognize neighbors, and remember the past; how they have agency about the future; elicit warnings and mount defenses, compete and cooperate with one another with sophistication, characteristics ascribed to human intelligence, traits that are the essence of civil societies--and at the center of it all, the Mother Trees: the mysterious, powerful forces that connect and sustain the others that surround them.

Simard writes of her own life, born and raised into a logging world in the rainforests of British Columbia, of her days as a child spent cataloging the trees from the forest and how she came to love and respect them--embarking on a journey of discovery, and struggle. And as she writes of her scientific quest, she writes of her own journey--of love and loss, of observation and change, of risk and reward, making us understand how deeply human scientific inquiry exists beyond data and technology, that it is about understanding who we are and our place in the world, and, in writing of her own life, we come to see the true connectedness of the Mother Tree that nurtures the forest in the profound ways that families and human societies do, and how these inseparable bonds enable all our survival.

From the founder and activist behind one of the largest movements of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the "me too" movement, Tarana Burke debuts a powerful memoir about her own journey to saying those two simple yet infinitely powerful words―me too―and how she brought empathy back to an entire generation in one of the largest cultural events in American history.

Tarana didn’t always have the courage to say "me too." As a child, she reeled from her sexual assault, believing she was responsible. Unable to confess what she thought of as her own sins for fear of shattering her family, her soul split in two. One side was the bright, intellectually curious third generation Bronxite steeped in Black literature and power, and the other was the bad, shame ridden girl who thought of herself as a vile rule breaker, not as a victim. She tucked one away, hidden behind a wall of pain and anger, which seemed to work...until it didn’t.

Tarana fought to reunite her fractured self, through organizing, pursuing justice, and finding community. In her debut memoir she shares her extensive work supporting and empowering Black and brown girls, and the devastating realization that to truly help these girls she needed to help that scared, ashamed child still in her soul. She needed to stop running and confront what had happened to her, for Heaven and Diamond and the countless other young Black women for whom she cared. They gave her the courage to embrace her power. A power which in turn she shared with the entire world. Through these young Black and brown women, Tarana found that we can only offer empathy to others if we first offer it to ourselves.

Unbound is the story of an inimitable woman’s inner strength and perseverance, all in pursuit of bringing healing to her community and the world around her, but it is also a story of possibility, of empathy, of power, and of the leader we all have inside ourselves. In sharing her path toward healing and saying "me too," Tarana reaches out a hand to help us all on our own journeys.

In 1850s South Carolina, an enslaved woman named Rose faced a crisis, the imminent sale of her daughter Ashley. Thinking quickly, she packed a cotton bag with a few precious items as a token of love and to try to ensure Ashley’s survival. Soon after, the nine-year-old girl was separated from her mother and sold.

Decades later, Ashley’s granddaughter Ruth embroidered this family history on the bag in spare yet haunting language—including Rose’s wish that “It be filled with my Love always.” Ruth’s sewn words, the reason we remember Ashley’s sack today, evoke a sweeping family story of loss and of love passed down through generations. Now, in this illuminating, deeply moving book inspired by Rose’s gift to Ashley, historian Tiya Miles carefully unearths these women’s faint presence in archival records to follow the paths of their lives—and the lives of so many women like them—to write a singular and revelatory history of the experience of slavery, and the uncertain freedom afterward, in the United States.

The search to uncover this history is part of the story itself. For where the historical record falls short of capturing Rose’s, Ashley’s, and Ruth’s full lives, Miles turns to objects and to art as equally important sources, assembling a chorus of women’s and families’ stories and critiquing the scant archives that for decades have overlooked so many. The contents of Ashley’s sack—a tattered dress, handfuls of pecans, a braid of hair, “my Love always”—are eloquent evidence of the lives these women lived. As she follows Ashley’s journey, Miles metaphorically unpacks the bag, deepening its emotional resonance and exploring the meanings and significance of everything it contained.

All That She Carried is a poignant story of resilience and of love passed down through generations of women against steep odds. It honors the creativity and fierce resourcefulness of people who preserved family ties even when official systems refused to do so, and it serves as a visionary illustration of how to reconstruct and recount their stories today.

Tove Ditlevsen is today celebrated as one of the most important and unique voices in twentieth-century Danish literature, and The Copenhagen Trilogy (1969-71) is her acknowledged masterpiece. Childhood tells the story of a misfit child's single-minded determination to become a poet; Youth describes her early experiences of sex, work, and independence. Dependency picks up the story as the narrator embarks on the first of her four marriages and goes on to describe her horrible descent into drug addiction, enabled by her sinister, gaslighting doctor-husband.

Throughout, the narrator grapples with the tension between her vocation as a writer and her competing roles as daughter, wife, mother, and drug addict, and she writes about female experience and identity in a way that feels very fresh and pertinent to today's discussions around feminism. Ditlevsen's trilogy is remarkable for its intensity and its immersive depiction of a world of complex female friendships, family and growing up--in this sense, it's Copenhagen's answer to Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Novels. She can also be seen as a spiritual forerunner of confessional writers like Karl Ove Knausgaard, Annie Ernaux, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy. Her trilogy is drawn from her own experiences but reads like the most compelling kind of fiction.

Born in a working-class neighborhood in Copenhagen in 1917, Ditlevsen became famous for her poetry while still a teenager, and went on to write novels, stories and memoirs before committing suicide in 1976. Having been dismissed by the critical establishment in her lifetime as a working-class, female writer, she is now being rediscovered and championed as one of Denmark's most important modern authors, with Tove fever gripping readers.

The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s AmericaIn June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes.

When Jennifer Doudna was in sixth grade, she came home one day to find that her dad had left a paperback titled The Double Helix on her bed. She put it aside, thinking it was one of those detective tales she loved. When she read it on a rainy Saturday, she discovered she was right, in a way. As she sped through the pages, she became enthralled by the intense drama behind the competition to discover the building block of life. Even though her high school counselor told her girls didn't become scientists, she decided she would.

Driven by a passion to understand how nature works and to turn discoveries into inventions, she would help to make what the book's author, James Watson, told her was...

Through poverty, adolescence, and a fraught relationship with her mother, Ashley C. Ford wishes she could turn to her father for hope and encouragement. There are just a few problems: he’s in prison, and she doesn’t know what he did to end up there. She doesn’t know how to deal with the incessant worries that keep her up at night, or how to handle the changes in her body that draw unwanted attention from men. In her search for unconditional love, Ashley begins dating a boy her mother hates. When the relationship turns sour, he assaults her. Still reeling from the rape, which she keeps secret from her family, Ashley desperately searches for meaning in the chaos. Then, her grandmother reveals the truth about her father’s incarceration . . . and Ashley’s entire world is turned upside down.

Somebody’s Daughter steps into the world of growing up a poor Black girl in Indiana with a family fragmented by incarceration, exploring how isolating and complex such a childhood can be. As Ashley battles her body and her environment, she embarks on a powerful journey to find the threads between who she is and what she was born into, and the complicated familial love that often binds them.

In Invisible Child, Pulitzer Prize winner Andrea Elliott follows eight dramatic years in the life of Dasani, a girl whose imagination is as soaring as the skyscrapers near her Brooklyn shelter. In this sweeping narrative, Elliott weaves the story of Dasani’s childhood with the history of her ancestors, tracing their passage from slavery to the Great Migration north. As Dasani comes of age, New York City’s homeless crisis has exploded, deepening the chasm between rich and poor. She must guide her siblings through a world riddled by hunger, violence, racism, drug addiction, and the threat of foster care. Out on the street, Dasani becomes a fierce fighter “to protect those who I love.” When she finally escapes city life to enroll in a boarding school, she faces an impossible question: What if leaving poverty means abandoning your family, and yourself?

A work of luminous and riveting prose, Elliott’s Invisible Child reads like a page-turning novel. It is an astonishing story about the power of resilience, the importance of family and the cost of inequality—told through the crucible of one remarkable girl.

Winner of the J. Anthony Lukas Book Prize • Finalist for the Bernstein Award and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award • Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize

Weaving together American history, dramatic family chronicle, and searing episodes of memoir, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth provides a historian’s view of the country’s long road to Juneteenth, recounting both its origins in Texas and the enormous hardships that African-Americans have endured in the century since, from Reconstruction through Jim Crow and beyond. All too aware of the stories of cowboys, ranchers, and oilmen that have long dominated the lore of the Lone Star State, Gordon-Reed―herself a Texas native and the descendant of enslaved people brought to Texas as early as the 1820s―forges a new and profoundly truthful narrative of her home state, with implications for us all.

Combining personal anecdotes with poignant facts gleaned from the annals of American history, Gordon-Reed shows how, from the earliest presence of Black people in Texas to the day in Galveston on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger announced the end of legalized slavery in the state, African-Americans played an integral role in the Texas story.

Reworking the traditional “Alamo” framework, she powerfully demonstrates, among other things, that the slave- and race-based economy not only defined the fractious era of Texas independence but precipitated the Mexican-American War and, indeed, the Civil War itself.

In its concision, eloquence, and clear presentation of history, On Juneteenth vitally revises conventional renderings of Texas and national history. As our nation verges on recognizing June 19 as a national holiday, On Juneteenth is both an essential account and a stark reminder that the fight for equality is exigent and ongoing. 2 black-and-white illustrations

De zomervakantie is voorbij, maar Harry Potter keert dit jaar niet terug naar Zweinstein. Hij staat voor de gevaarlijke en haast onmogelijke opdracht van Perkamentus: de overgebleven Gruzielementen opsporen en vernietigen. Zal hem dat lukken?

Na een verschrikkelijke vakantie bij zijn gemene oom en tante gaat Harry Potter naar de tweede klas van Zweinsteins Hogeschool voor Hekserij en Hocus-Pocus. Het blijkt echter een hele heksentoer te zijn om daar te komen, zodat Harry en zijn vriend Ron ten slotte in een vliegende auto naar school gaan.

Na alle avonturen van het eerste schooljaar denkt Harry zich rustig aan zijn lessen Toverdranken, Verweer tegen de Zwarte Kunsten en zijn favoriete sport Zwerkbal te kunnen wijden, maar niets blijkt minder waar. Een mysterieuze stem roept hem, er vinden aanslagen plaats en Harry ontdekt een wel heel bijzonder dagboek.

Harry kan niet wachten tot hij terug mag naar Zweinsteins Hogeschool voor Hekserij en Hocus-Pocus, om aan zijn vierde schooljaar te beginnen. Maar voor het zover is, wordt hij door de familie Wemel op spectaculaire wijze bij de Duffelingen opgehaald, om mee te gaan naar de finale van het WK Zwerkbal! Harry weet dan nog niet dat er dat jaar op Zweinstein een nog groter en spannender evenement zal plaatsvinden. Ondanks alle opwinding en magische gebeurtenissen, probeert hij zich toch op zijn lessen te concentreren. Ondertussen zijn er allerlei tekenen die er op wijzen dat Voldemort, met behulp van Duistere tovenaars, weer aan kracht begint te winnen. De angst dat Hij Die Niet Genoemd Mag Worden opnieuw zal toeslaan, wordt steeds groter...

Harry Potter heeft nog nooit van Zweinstein gehoord als de brieven door de bus van Ligusterlaan 4 worden gegooid. De perkamentachtige enveloppen, beschreven met groene inkt en bestempeld met een paars zegel, worden al snel door zijn nare oom en tante in beslag genomen. Op Harry's verjaardag krijgt hij echter bezoek van een reus van een man met ogen als zwarte torren. Hij heet Rubeus Hagrid en heeft verbazingwekkend nieuws: Harry Potter is een tovenaar, en er is plek voor hem op Zweinsteins Hogeschool voor Hekserij en Hocus-Pocus. Er staat hem een ongelooflijk avontuur te wachten!

When Harry Potter is left on a doorstep as a baby, he has no idea he is the Boy Who Lived, or that he is famous throughout the wizarding world. Years later, he is astonished to receive an acceptance letter to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry and he is soon whisked off on a magical adventure like no other. Join Harry and his fiercely loyal friends, Hermione and Ron, in this story about the power of truth, love and hope.

Having become classics of our time, the Harry Potter eBooks never fail to bring comfort and escapism. With their message of hope, belonging and the enduring power of truth and love, the story of the Boy Who Lived continues to delight generations of new readers.

Voordat Harry Potter aan zijn derde jaar op Zweinstein kan beginnen, moet hij de zomervakantie doorbrengen bij zijn gemene oom en tante en vervelende neefje Dirk. Door een magisch ongelukje komt hij 's avonds laat opeens op straat te staan. Dan blijkt, dat Sirius Zwarts, een beruchte volgeling van Voldemort, uit de gevangenis van Azkaban is ontsnapt. Hij is op de vlucht en heeft het wellicht op Harry gemunt.

Er volgt een enerverend schooljaar met nieuwe vakken als Dreuzelkunde en Zorg voor Fabeldieren, spannende Zwerkbalwedstrijden en griezelige voorspellingen.
De school wordt bewaakt door Dementors, de gevreesde bewakers van Azkaban en Harry zal zijn lessen Verweer tegen de Zwarte Kunsten hard nodig hebben.

Harry’s verplichte zomervakantie bij oom Herman en tante Petunia op de Ligusterlaan is dit keer nog erger dan alle voorgaande jaren: niet alleen wordt hij door de Duffelingen weer vreselijk behandeld, ook zijn beste vrienden lijken hem deze zomer totaal te negeren. Harry vindt dat hij iets moet doen, maakt niet uit wat, om zo snel mogelijk te kunnen terugkeren naar Zweinsteins Hogeschool voor Hekserij en Hocus-Pocus. Maar dan krijgt de vakantie een onverwacht einde en wordt het zelfs onzeker of Harry nog wel aan zijn vijfde schooljaar op Zweinstein mag beginnen. Vreemde gebeurtenissen stapelen zich op en Harry doet ontdekkingen die het hem onmogelijk maken kalm te blijven...

Het land wordt geteisterd door vreemde rampen en aanslagen en hoewel het hartje zomer is hangt er een hardnekkige, onheilspellende mist. In de Ligusterlaan zit Harry Potter ’s avonds laat ongeduldig op de komst van professor Perkamentus te wachten. Wat kan er er zo belangrijk zijn dat Perkamentus hem bij de Duffelingen op komt zoeken en dat niet wachten kan tot Harry’s terugkeer naar Zweinstein? Zou het iets te maken hebben met de oude profetie die Harry aan het eind van zijn vijfde schooljaar gehoord heeft? Harry’s zesde jaar op Zweinstein begint ongebruikelijk, als Voldemort opnieuw aan kracht wint en de werelden van Dreuzels en tovenaars zich steeds meer met elkaar vermengen...

'Even when I was funny, I wasn't this funny.' Augusten Burroughs. For fans of Tina Fey, David Sedaris and anyone who's ever felt like a misfit, an outrageously funny and disturbing memoir from Jenny Lawson, aka The Bloggess. 'When I tell people that my father is kind of a total lunatic, they laugh and nod knowingly. they assure me that theirs is too, and that he's just a "typical father". And they're probably right, if the typical father runs a full-time taxidermy business out of the house, and shows up at the local bar with a miniature donkey and a teddy Roosevelt impersonator, and thinks other people are weird for making such a big deal out of it. If the typical father says things like "Happy birthday! Here's a bathtub of raccoons!" or "We'll have to take your car. Mine has too much blood in it," then yeah, he's totally normal.' When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. that dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a childhood of wearing winter shoes made out of used bread sacks. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humour in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. Lawson's long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments - the ones we want to pretend never happened - are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. Like laughing at a funeral, LEt'S PREtEND tHIS NEVER HAPPENED is both irreverent and impossible to hold back once you get started. 'the Bloggess writes stuff that actually is laugh-out-loud, but you know that really you shouldn't be laughing and probably you'll go to hell for laughing, so maybe you shouldn't read it.' Neil Gaiman 'Even when I was funny, I wasn't this funny.' Augusten Burroughs, author of RUNNING WItH SCISSORS

Mindy Kaling has lived many lives: the obedient child of immigrant professionals, a timid chubster afraid of her own bike, a Ben Affleck–impersonating Off-Broadway performer and playwright, and, finally, a comedy writer and actress prone to starting fights with her friends and coworkers with the sentence “Can I just say one last thing about this, and then I swear I’ll shut up about it?”

Perhaps you want to know what Mindy thinks makes a great best friend (someone who will fill your prescription in the middle of the night), or what makes a great guy (one who is aware of all elderly people in any room at any time and acts accordingly), or what is the perfect amount of fame (so famous you can never get convicted of murder in a court of law), or how to maintain a trim figure (you will not find that information in these pages). If so, you’ve come to the right book, mostly!

With several conveniently placed stopping points for you to run errands and make phone calls, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? proves that Mindy Kaling really is just a Girl Next Door—not so much literally anywhere in the continental United States, but definitely if you live in India or Sri Lanka.

Chronicles the off-beat and occasionally extraterrestrial journeys, notions, and acquaintances of galactic traveler Arthur Dent

In one complete volume, here are the five classic novels from Douglas Adams’s beloved Hitchhiker series.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ( Nominated as one of America’s best-loved novels by PBS’s The Great American Read )
Seconds before the Earth is demolished for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is saved by Ford Prefect, a researcher for the revised Guide. Together they stick out their thumbs to the stars and begin a wild journey through time and space.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
The moment before annihilation at the hands of warmongers is a curious time to crave tea. It could only happen to the cosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his comrades as they hurtle across the galaxy in a desperate search for a place to eat.

Life, the Universe and Everything
The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking at the night sky– so they plan to destroy it. The universe, that is. Now only five individuals can avert Armageddon: mild-mannered Arthur Dent and his stalwart crew.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Back on Earth, Arthur Dent is ready to believe that the past eight years were all just a figment of his stressed-out imagination. But a gift-wrapped fishbowl with a cryptic inscription thrusts him back to reality. So to speak.

Mostly Harmless
Just when Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life, all hell breaks loose. Can he save the Earth from total obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter from herself?

Everyone’s life is governed by an internal code of conduct. Some call it morality. Others call it religion. But Bros in the know call this Holy Grail The Bro Code.

The Bro Code is a living document, much like the Constitution. Except instead of outlining a government, or the Bill of Rights, or anything even resembling laws, The Bro Code provides men with all the rules they need to know in order to become a “bro” and behave properly among other bros. Historically a spoken tradition passed from one generation to the next and dating back to the American Revolution, the official code of conduct for Bros appears here in its published form for the first time ever. By upholding the tenets of this sacred and legendary document, any dude can learn to achieve Bro-dom.

Containing approximately 150 “unspoken” rules, this code of conduct for bros can range from the simple (bros before hos) to the complex (the hot-to-crazy ratio, complete with bar graphs and charts). With helpful sidebros The Bro Code will help any ordinary guy become the best bro he can be. Let ultimate bro and coauthor Barney Stinson and his book, The Bro Code share their wisdom, lest you be caught making eye contact in a devil’s three-way (two dudes, duh).

One word. Unlimited consequences.

The book that inspired the major film starring Jim Carrey and Zooey Deschanel'I, Danny Wallace, being of sound mind and body, do hereby write this manifesto for my life. I swear I will be more open to opportunity. I swear I will live my life taking every available chance. I will say Yes to every favour, request, suggestion and invitation. I WILL SWEAR TO SAY YES WHERE ONCE I WOULD SAY NO.'Danny Wallace had been staying in. Far too much. Having been dumped by his girlfriend, he really wasn't doing the young, free and single thing very well. Instead he was avoiding people. Texting them instead of calling them. Calling them instead of meeting them. That is until one fateful date when a mystery man on a late-night bus told him to 'say yes more'. These three simple words changed Danny's life forever. Yes Man is the story of what happened when Danny decided to say YES to everything, in order to make his life more interesting. And boy, did it get more interesting.

Before Liz Lemon, before "Weekend Update," before "Sarah Palin," Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV.She has seen both these dreams come true.At last, Tina Fey's story can be told. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live ; from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor; from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence.Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we've always suspected: you're no one until someone calls you bossy.Includes Special, Never-Before-Solicited Opinions on Breastfeeding, Princesses, Photoshop, the Electoral Process, and Italian Rum Cake!

Het diner van Herman Koch is een briljante en grensverleggende roman. Het verhaal voltrekt zich binnen de tijdspanne van een avond en ontwikkelt zich tot een adembenemende thriller. Verfilmd in 2017.

Herman Koch brak wereldwijd door met Het diner, een weergaloze roman die de vraag opwekt in hoeverre je als ouder verantwoordelijk bent voor de daden van je eigen kind. In soepel proza schotelt Herman Koch de lezer een bloedstollend verhaal voor dat zich binnen de tijdsspanne van een avond voltrekt.

Twee echtparen gaan een avond uit eten in een restaurant. Ze praten over alledaagse dingen, dingen waar mensen tijdens etentjes over praten: werk, de laatste films, vakantieplannen. Maar ondertussen vermijden ze waar ze het eigenlijk over moeten hebben: hun kinderen. De twee vijftienjarige zoons van beide echtparen, Michel en Rick, hebben samen iets uitgehaald wat hun toekomst kan verwoesten. Tot dusver zijn alleen vage beelden van de twee in Opsporing verzocht vertoond en zit het onderzoek naar hun identiteit vast. Maar hoe lang nog? Wat de situatie nog ingewikkelder maakt is dat de vader van Rick de beoogde nieuwe minister-president van Nederland is.

'De roman ontwikkelt zich tot een adembenemende thriller waarin niemand onschuldig is. Koch houdt de lezer in zijn greep.' – Niccolò Ammaniti

'De beste Nederlandse roman die ik in maanden heb gelezen.' – Pieter Steinz in NRC Handelsblad

'Een briljante tragikomedie over de rekbaarheid van morele verantwoordelijkheid. De lezer moet voortdurend zijn inzichten bijstellen.' – Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

'Intrigerend en zeer lezenswaardig.' – The New York Times Book Review

'Een grensverleggend, intelligent geschreven en belangrijk boek.' – Nordjyske

'Herman Koch is razendsnel een van mijn favoriete schrijvers aan het worden. Zijn drie boeken zijn als een ijzersterke EP waarvan elk nummer raak is.' – Stephen King

The Mom Test is a quick, practical guide that will save you time, money, and heartbreak.

They say you shouldn't ask your mom whether your business is a good idea, because she loves you and will lie to you. This is technically true, but it misses the point. You shouldn't ask anyone if your business is a good idea. It's a bad question and everyone will lie to you at least a little. As a matter of fact, it's not their responsibility to tell you the truth. It's your responsibility to find it and it's worth doing right.

Talking to customers is one of the foundational skills of both Customer Development and Lean Startup. We all know we're supposed to do it, but nobody seems willing to admit that it's easy to screw up and hard to do right. This book is going to show you how customer conversations go wrong and how you can do better.

Begin your journey into Middle-earth.

The inspiration for the upcoming original series on Prime Video, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power.

The Two Towers is the second part of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic adventure The Lord of the Rings.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them.

Frodo and his Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom. They have lost the wizard, Gandalf, in a battle in the Mines of Moria. And Boromir, seduced by the power of the Ring, tried to seize it by force. While Frodo and Sam made their escape, the rest of the company was attacked by Orcs. Now they continue the journey alone down the great River Anduin—alone, that is, save for the mysterious creeping figure that follows wherever they go.

Concluding the story begun in The Hobbit, this is the final part of Tolkien s epic masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, featuring an exclusive cover image from the film, the definitive text, and a detailed map of Middle-earth.

The armies of the Dark Lord Sauron are massing as his evil shadow spreads ever wider. Men, Dwarves, Elves and Ents unite forces to do battle agains the Dark. Meanwhile, Frodo and Sam struggle further into Mordor in their heroic quest to destroy the One Ring.

The devastating conclusion of J.R.R. Tolkien s classic tale of magic and adventure, begun in The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers, features the definitive edition of the text and includes the Appendices and a revised Index in full.

To celebrate the release of the first of Peter Jackson s two-part film adaptation of The Hobbit, THE HOBBIT: AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY, this third part of The Lord of the Rings is available for a limited time with an exclusive cover image from Peter Jackson s award-winning trilogy.

"

An illustrated edition of the enchanting prequel to The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit —the classic fantasy that inspired Peter Jackson’s major motion picture trilogy—in a newly expanded edition.

When Thorin Oakenshield and his band of dwarves embark upon a dangerous quest to reclaim the hoard of gold stolen from them by the evil dragon Smaug, Gandalf the wizard suggests an unlikely accomplice: Bilbo Baggins, an unassuming Hobbit dwelling in peaceful Hobbiton.

Along the way, the company faces trolls, goblins, giant spiders, and worse. But as they journey from the wonders of Rivendell to the terrors of Mirkwood and beyond, Bilbo will find that there is more to him than anyone—himself included—ever dreamed. Unexpected qualities of courage and cunning, and a love of adventure, propel Bilbo toward his great destiny ... a destiny that waits in the dark caverns beneath the Misty Mountains, where a twisted creature known as Gollum jealously guards a precious magic ring.

One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkeness bind them

In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, The Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell into the hands of Bilbo Baggins, as told in The Hobbit.

In a sleepy village in the Shire, young Frodo Baggins finds himself faced with an immense task, as his elderly cousin Bilbo entrusts the Ring to his care. Frodo must leave his home and make a perilous journey across Middle-earth to the Cracks of Doom, there to destroy the Ring and foil the Dark Lord in his evil purpose.

An alternate cover edition can be found here and here**

A great modern classic and the prelude to The Lord of the Rings.

Bilbo Baggins is a hobbit who enjoys a comfortable, unambitious life, rarely traveling any farther than his pantry or cellar. But his contentment is disturbed when the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves arrive on his doorstep one day to whisk him away on an adventure. They have launched a plot to raid the treasure hoard guarded by Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon.

Bilbo reluctantly joins their quest, unaware that on his journey to the Lonely Mountain he will encounter both a magic ring and a frightening creature known as Gollum.

Rarely has there been a tale as gripping, or one as likely to seize the minds and hearts of a generation, as George R. R. Martin's epic high fantasy series. In A Game of Thrones, an ancient kingdom was torn by the ambitions of ruthless men and women; in A Clash of Kings, war, sorcery, and madness swept over the kingdom like a voracious beast of prey. Now, as the brutal struggle for power nears its tumultuous climax, the battered and divided kingdom faces its most terrifying invasion—one that is being spearheaded from beyond the grave....

A STORM OF SWORDS

Of the five contenders for power, one is dead, another in disfavor, and still the wars rage as violently as ever, as alliances are made and broken. Joffrey, of House Lannister, sits on the Iron Throne, the uneasy ruler of the land of the Seven Kingdoms. His most bitter rival, Lord Stannis, stands defeated and disgraced, the victim of the jealous sorceress who holds him in her evil thrall. But young Robb, of House Stark, still rules the North from the fortress of Riverrun. Robb plots against his despised Lannister enemies, even as they hold his sister hostage at King's Landing, the seat of the Iron Throne. Meanwhile, making her way across a blood-drenched continent is the exiled queen, Daenerys, mistress of the only three dragons still left in the world. Filled with the stench of death and decay from the destructive dynastic war, Daenerys is gathering allies and strength for an assault on King's Landing, hoping to win back the crown she believes is rightfully hers. But as opposing forces maneuver for the final titanic showdown, an army of barbaric wildlings bent on overwhelming the Seven Kingdoms arrives from the outermost line of civilization. In their vanguard is a horde of mythical Others—a supernatural army of the living dead whose animated corpses are unstoppable. And as the future of the land hangs in the balance, no one will rest in the quest for victory until the Seven Kingdoms have exploded in a veritable storm of swords.... Brilliantly conceived and grand in scope, A Storm of Swords is the incredible tale of a world of harsh beauty and powerful magic, torn by treachery, ravaged by brutality, and consumed by greed and ambition. It portrays a war-torn landscape in which nobles and commoners, heroes and villains, the freeborn and the enslaved, all struggle to survive and to find their destinies...along with the dazzling bounty and wondrous enchantment that was once their birthright in the Seven Kingdoms.

Few books have captivated the imagination and won the devotion and praise of readers and critics everywhere as has George R. R. Martin’s monumental epic cycle of high fantasy. Now, in A Feast for Crows* , Martin delivers the long-awaited fourth book of his landmark series, as a kingdom torn asunder finds itself at last on the brink of peace ... only to be launched on an even more terrifying course of destruction.

**A FEAST FOR CROWS

** It seems too good to be true. After centuries of bitter strife and fatal treachery, the seven powers dividing the land have decimated one another into an uneasy truce. Or so it appears.... With the death of the monstrous King Joffrey, Cersei is ruling as regent in King’s Landing. Robb Stark’s demise has broken the back of the Northern rebels, and his siblings are scattered throughout the kingdom like seeds on barren soil. Few legitimate claims to the once desperately sought Iron Throne still exist—or they are held in hands too weak or too distant to wield them effectively. The war, which raged out of control for so long, has burned itself out.

But as in the aftermath of any climactic struggle, it is not long before the survivors, outlaws, renegades, and carrion eaters start to gather, picking over the bones of the dead and fighting for the spoils of the soon-to-be dead. Now in the Seven Kingdoms, as the human crows assemble over a banquet of ashes, daring new plots and dangerous new alliances are formed, while surprising faces—some familiar, others only just appearing—are seen emerging from an ominous twilight of past struggles and chaos to take up the challenges ahead.

It is a time when the wise and the ambitious, the deceitful and the strong will acquire the skills, the power, and the magic to survive the stark and terrible times that lie before them. It is a time for nobles and commoners, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and sages to come together and stake their fortunes ... and their lives. For at a feast for crows, many are the guests—but only a few are the survivors.

From a master of contemporary fantasy comes the first novel of a landmark series unlike any you've ever read before. With A Game of Thrones, George R. R. Martin has launched a genuine masterpiece, bringing together the best the genre has to offer. Mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure fill the pages of this magnificent saga, the first volume in an epic series sure to delight fantasy fans everywhere.

Long ago, in a time forgotten, a preternatural event threw the seasons out of balance. In a land where summers can last decades and winters a lifetime, trouble is brewing. The cold is returning, and in the frozen wastes to the north of Winterfell, sinister forces are massing beyond the kingdom's protective Wall. To the south, the king's powers are failing--his most trusted adviser dead under mysterious circumstances and his enemies emerging from the shadows of the throne. At the center of the conflict lie the Starks of Winterfell, a family as harsh and unyielding as the frozen land they were born to. Now Lord Eddard Stark is reluctantly summoned to serve as the king's new Hand, an appointment that threatens to sunder not only his family but the kingdom itself. Sweeping from a harsh land of cold to a summertime kingdom of epicurean plenty, A Game of Thrones tells a tale of lords and ladies, soldiers and sorcerers, assassins and bastards, who come together in a time of grim omens. Here an enigmatic band of warriors bear swords of no human metal; a tribe of fierce wildlings carry men off into madness; a cruel young dragon prince barters his sister to win back his thro≠ a child is lost in the twilight between life and death; and a determined woman undertakes a treacherous journey to protect all she holds dear. Amid plots and counter-plots, tragedy and betrayal, victory and terror, allies and enemies, the fate of the Starks hangs perilously in the balance, as each side endeavors to win that deadliest of conflicts: the game of thrones. Unparalleled in scope and execution, A Game of Thrones is one of those rare reading experiences that catch you up from the opening pages, won't let you go until the end, and leave you yearning for more.

A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. Two great leaders—Lord Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon—who hold sway over an age of enforced peace are dead, victims of royal treachery. Now, from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war.

It is a tale in which brother plots against brother and the dead rise to walk in the night. Here a princess masquerades as an orphan boy; a knight of the mind prepares a poison for a treacherous sorceress; and wild men descend from the Mountains of the Moon to ravage the countryside. Against a backdrop of incest and fratricide, alchemy and murder, victory may go to the men and women possessed of the coldest steel...and the coldest hearts. For when kings clash, the whole land trembles.

Here is the second volume in George R.R. Martin magnificent cycle of novels that includes A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords. As a whole, this series comprises a genuine masterpiece of modern fantasy, bringing together the best the genre has to offer. Magic, mystery, intrigue, romance, and adventure fill these pages and transport us to a world unlike any we have ever experienced. Already hailed as a classic, George R.R. Martin stunning series is destined to stand as one of the great achievements of imaginative fiction.

Broken Angels is a standalone sequel, to Richard Morgan's debut novel Altered Carbon--a high-tech, ultra-violent, noir SF thriller which attracted much attention, including a movie deal.

Thirty years later, our super-soldier hero Takeshi Kovacs is wearing yet another body (swapping is easy in this future), already wounded in a messy war against revolutionary forces on the planet Sanction IV. Very soon he's lured from his duties into a hunt for a fantastic treasure discovered by archaeologists and carefully hushed up. The long-vanished Martians who once colonised the galaxy have left a buried hyperspace gateway leading to a working starship in distant orbit.

Kovacs uses frightening violence to get the attention of corporate sponsors even more ruthless than himself. His hastily assembled exploration team must work in a lethal fallout zone, racing to open the gate before they're stopped by radiation sickness, treacherous sabotage, or the threat of fast-evolving nanoweaponry. And there are repeated hints that if they ever make it through that gateway, worse things are waiting on the far side...

It's all desperately tense and crafted with appalling inventiveness. Life is cheap and death is no release, because the "cortical stack" implanted in everyone's spine constantly records the total personality, ready for "re-sleeving" in a new clone body or storage in virtual reality. So Kovacs goes recruiting at the macabre Soul Market, where thanks to the war there are literal skiploads of hacked-out sections of human spine containing stacks--for sale by the kilogram.

Other ingredients include sex, voodoo, torture, multiple betrayal, cool military technology, incomprehensible alien constructions, age-old cycles of catastrophe, and--above all--extreme violence. The screw is turned further and further, beyond what seems possible. Readers may find themselves forgetting to breathe. This is a rattling good yarn, for the strong of stomach. --David Langford

Richard K. Morgan has received widespread praise for his astounding twenty-fifth-century novels featuring Takeshi Kovacs, and has established a growing legion of fans. Mixing classic noir sensibilities with a searing futuristic vision of an age when death is nearly meaningless, Morgan returns to his saga of betrayal, mystery, and revenge, as Takeshi Kovacs, in one fatal moment, joins forces with a mysterious woman who may have the power to shatter Harlan’s World forever.

Once a gang member, then a marine, then a galaxy-hopping Envoy trained to wreak slaughter and suppression across the stars, a bleeding, wounded Kovacs was chilling out in a New Hokkaido bar when some so-called holy men descended on a slim beauty with tangled, hyperwired hair. An act of quixotic chivalry later and Kovacs was in deep: mixed up with a woman with two names, many powers, and one explosive history.

In a world where the real and virtual are one and the same and the dead can come back to life, the damsel in distress may be none other than the infamous Quellcrist Falconer, the vaporized symbol of a freedom now gone from Harlan’s World. Kovacs can deal with the madness of AI. He can do his part in a battle against biomachines gone wild, search for a three-centuries-old missing weapons system, and live with a blood feud with the yakuza, and even with the betrayal of people he once trusted. But when his relationship with “the” Falconer brings him an enemy specially designed to destroy him, he knows it’s time to be afraid. After all, the guy sent to kill him is himself: but younger, stronger, and straight out of hell.

Wild, provocative, and riveting, Woken Furies is a full-bore science fiction spectacular of the highest order–from one of the most original and spellbinding storytellers at work today.

From the Hardcover edition.

In the twenty-fifth century, humankind has spread throughout the galaxy, monitored by the watchful eye of the U.N. While divisions in race, religion, and class still exist, advances in technology have redefined life itself. Now, assuming one can afford the expensive procedure, a person's consciousness can be stored in a cortical stack at the base of the brain and easily downloaded into a new body (or "sleeve") making death nothing more than a minor blip on a screen.

Ex-U.N. envoy Takeshi Kovacs has been killed before, but his last death was particularly painful. Dispatched one hundred eighty light-years from home, re-sleeved into a body in Bay City (formerly San Francisco, now with a rusted, dilapidated Golden Gate Bridge), Kovacs is thrown into the dark heart of a shady, far-reaching conspiracy that is vicious even by the standards of a society that treats "existence" as something that can be bought and sold. For Kovacs, the shell that blew a hole in his chest was only the beginning....

"Morgan's debut novel, the first in a series, combines noir mystery with ultra-high tech science to create a complex sf thriller. Featuring a hard-nosed antihero with his own sense of personal honor and ethics, this is highly recommended for sf collections."— Library Journal

AN UP-TO-THE -MINUTE ADAPTATION OF DALE CARNEGIE ’S TIMELESS PRESCRIPTIONS FOR THE DIGITAL AGE

DALE CARNEGIE’s commonsense approach to communicating has endured for a century, touching millions and millions of readers. The only diploma that hangs in Warren Buffett’s office is his certificate from Dale Carnegie Training. Lee Iacocca credits Carnegie for giving him the courage to speak in public. Dilbert creator Scott Adams called Carnegie’s teachings “life-changing.”

In today’s world, where more and more of our communication takes place across wires and screens, Carnegie’s lessons have not only lasted but become all the more critical. Though he never could have predicted technology’s trajectory, Carnegie proves a wise and helpful teacher in this digital landscape. To demonstrate the many ways his lessons remain relevant, Dale Carnegie & Associates, Inc., has reimagined his prescriptions and his advice for this difficult digital age. We may communicate today with different tools and with greater speed, but Carnegie’s advice on how to communicate, lead, and work efficiently remains priceless across the ages.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "This book delivers completely new and refreshing ideas on how to create value in the world."—Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta

"Peter Thiel has built multiple breakthrough companies, and Zero to One shows how."—Elon Musk, CEO of SpaceX and Tesla

The great secret of our time is that there are still uncharted frontiers to explore and new inventions to create. In Zero to One , legendary entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel shows how we can find singular ways to create those new things.

Thiel begins with the contrarian premise that we live in an age of technological stagnation, even if we’re too distracted by shiny mobile devices to notice. Information technology has improved rapidly, but there is no reason why progress should be limited to computers or Silicon Valley. Progress can be achieved in any industry or area of business. It comes from the most important skill that every leader must master: learning to think for yourself.

Doing what someone else already knows how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But when you do something new, you go from 0 to 1. The next Bill Gates will not build an operating system. The next Larry Page or Sergey Brin won’t make a search engine. Tomorrow’s champions will not win by competing ruthlessly in today’s marketplace. They will escape competition altogether, because their businesses will be unique.

Zero to One presents at once an optimistic view of the future of progress in America and a new way of thinking about innovation: it starts by learning to ask the questions that lead you to find value in unexpected places.

BOOK REPORT
Getting Real is the business, design, programming, and marketing philosophies of 37signals — a developer of web-based software used by over 1 million people and businesses in 70 countries.

WHY IS THE BOOK RELEVANT?
37signals used the unconventional Getting Real process to launch five successful web-based applications (Basecamp, Campfire, Backpack, Writeboard, Ta-da List), and Ruby on Rails, an open-source web application framework, in just two years with no funding, no debt, and only 7 people.

WHAT'S IN IT FOR ME?
Anyone working on a web app — including entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, executives, or marketers — will find value, fresh perspectives, and inspiration in this practical book. At under 200 pages it's quick reading too. Makes a great airplane book.

WHO IS 37SIGNALS?
We’re a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based software products possible with the least number of features necessary. Our products do less than the competition — intentionally. We’ve been in business since 1999 and love what we do.

Bob Altemeyer - author of Atheists and The Authoritarian Specter - gives a readable analysis of the nature of authoritarianism and its current impact on American politics.

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, the authors of the New York Times bestseller Rework, are back with a manifesto to combat all your modern workplace worries and fears. It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a direct successor to Rework, the instant bestseller that showed readers a new path to working effectively. Now Fried and Heinemeier Hansson have returned with a new strategy for the ideal company culture - what they call the calm company . It is a direct attack on the chaos, anxiety and stress that plagues millions of workplaces and billions of people working their day jobs. Working to breaking point with long hours, excessive workload, and a lack of sleep have become a badge of honour for many people these days, when it should be a mark of stupidity. This isn't just a problem for large organisations; individuals, contractors and solopreneurs are burning themselves out in the very same way. As the authors reveal, the answer isn't more hours. Rather, it's less waste and fewer things that induce distraction, always-on anxiety and stress. It is time to stop celebrating crazy and start celebrating calm. Fried and Hansson have the proof to back up their argument. Calm has been the cornerstone of their company's culture since Basecamp began twenty years ago. Destined to become the management guide for the next generation, It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work is a practical and inspiring distillation of their insights and experiences. It isn't a book telling you what to do. It's a book showing you what they've done-and how any manager or executive no matter the industry or size of the company, can do it too.

With timeless advice, up-to-the-minute insights, and more than ten million copies sold over fifty years, the world’s most popular and best-selling career guide is fully revised and expanded for 2021.

In today’s challenging job-market, as recent grads face a shifting economic landscape and seek work that pays and inspires, as workers are laid off mid-career, and as people search for an inspiring work-life change, the time-tested advice of What Color Is Your Parachute? is needed more than ever. This completely updated edition features the latest resources, strategies, and perspectives on today’s job market, revealing surprising advice on what works—and what doesn’t—so you can focus your efforts on tactics that yield results.

This practical manual has been fully revised for 2021 by Vanderbilt University Career Center Director Katharine Brooks, EdD, with modern advice on the job hunt strategies that are working today, such as building an online resume, making the most of social media tools to network effectively, interviewing virtually with confidence, and negotiating the best salary possible.

At its core is Richard N. Bolles’s famed Flower Exercise, a unique self-inventory that helps you design your career—and your life—around your key passions, transferable skills, traits, and more.

With the unique and authoritative guidance of What Color Is Your Parachute?, job-hunters and career changers will have all the tools they need to discover—and land—their dream job.

The New York Times and Washington Post bestseller that changed the way millions communicate “[Crucial Conversations] draws our attention to those defining moments that literally shape our lives, our relationships, and our world.... This book deserves to take its place as one of the key thought leadership contributions of our time.” —from the Foreword by Stephen R. Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People “The quality of your life comes out of the quality of your dialogues and conversations. Here’s how to instantly uplift your crucial conversations.” —Mark Victor Hansen, cocreator of the #1 New York Times bestselling series Chicken Soup for the Soul® The first edition of Crucial Conversations exploded onto the scene and revolutionized the way millions of people communicate when stakes are high. This new edition gives you the tools to: Prepare for high-stakes situations Transform anger and hurt feelings into powerful dialogue Make it safe to talk about almost anything Be persuasive, not abrasive

Alles is communicatie, je kunt niet niet communiceren. Daarom willen we jou graag via 10 tips inspireren om effectiever te communiceren. Na het lezen van deze 10 tips zul je anderen en jezelf beter begrijpen. Via bewezen theorieën en inspirerende voorbeelden ontvang je waardevolle tips en aanwijzingen, waarmee jij je voordeel kunt doen in je werkende leven én je privé-leven.

Hieronder een aantal tips dat in het boek aan bod komt:

• Luister meer, praat minder
• Zorg voor een positieve houding
• Neem tijd voor de ander
• Zeg vaker: hoe kan ik je helpen?
• Maak de verhouding positieve versus negatieve feedback

The author writes, "At the heart of this simple book lies the key to many of the struggles we face these days, from being productive and achieving our goals, to getting healthy and fit in the face of fast food and inactivity, to finding simplicity and peace amidst chaos and confusion. That key is itself simple: focus. Our ability to focus will allow us to create in ways that perhaps we haven't in years. It'll allow us to slow down and find peace of mind. It'll allow us to simplify and focus on less-on the essential things, the things that matter most.

Unleash the hidden power of your mind

It’s there in all of us. A mental resource we don’t think much about. Memory. And now there’s a way to master its power....

Through Harry Lorayne and Jerry Lucas’s simple, fail-safe memory system, you can become more effective, more imaginative, and more powerful at work, at school, in sports, and at play.

• Read with speed and greater understanding.
• File phone numbers, data, figures, and appointments right in your head.
• Send those birthday and anniversary cards on time.
• Learn foreign words and phrases with ease.
• Shine in the classroom and shorten study hours.
• Dominate social situations: Remember and use important personal details.

Begin today. The change in your life will be unforgettable

Harry Lorayne, who has trained his own memory to the point where he is acclaimed as having the most phenomenal memory in the world, has written the most practical and lucid memory-training book ever. Now, at last, with the famous Lorayne Link-and-Peg System, readers will be able to recall faces, names, appointments and anything else they need to acquire a winning edge.

Who needs investors?

More than two generations ago, the venture capital community – VCs, business angels, incubators and others – convinced the entrepreneurial world that writing business plans and raising venture capital constituted the twin centerpieces of entrepreneurial endeavor. They did so for good reasons: the sometimes astonishing returns they've delivered to their investors and the astonishingly large companies that their ecosystem has created.

But the vast majority of fast-growing companies never take any venture capital. So where does the money come from to start and grow their companies? From a much more agreeable and hospitable source, their customers. That's exactly what Michael Dell, Bill Gates and Banana Republic's Mel and Patricia Ziegler did to get their companies up and running and turn them into iconic brands.

In The Customer Funded Business , best-selling author John Mullins uncovers five novel approaches that scrappy and innovative 21st century entrepreneurs working in companies large and small have ingeniously adapted from their predecessors like Dell, Gates, and the Zieglers:

Matchmaker models (Airbnb)

Pay-in-advance models (Threadless)

Subscription models (TutorVista)

Scarcity models (Vente Privee)

Service-to-product models (GoViral)

Through the captivating stories of these and other inspiring companies from around the world, Mullins brings to life the five models and identifies the questions that angel or other investors will – and should! – ask of entrepreneurs or corporate innovators seeking to apply them. Drawing on in-depth interviews with entrepreneurs and investors who have actually put these models to use, Mullins goes on to address the key implementation issues that characterize each of the models: when to apply them, how best to apply them, and the pitfalls to watch out for.

Whether you're an aspiring entrepreneur lacking the start-up capital you need, an early-stage entrepreneur trying to get your cash-starved venture into take-off mode, an intrapreneur seeking funding within an established company, or an angel investor or mentor who supports high-potential ventures, this book offers the most sure-footed path to starting, financing, or growing your venture.

John Mullins is the author of The New Business Road Test and, with Randy Komisar, the widely acclaimed Getting to Plan B.

Never be at a loss for words again!

Perfect your people skills with his fun, witty and informative guide, containing 92 little tricks to create big success in personal and business relationships.

In How To Talk To Anyone, bestselling relationships author and internationally renowned life coach Leil Lowndes reveals the secrets and psychology behind successful communication. These extremely usable and intelligent techniques include how to:

• Work a party like a politician works a room
• Be an insider in any crowd
• Use key words and phrases to guide the conversation
• Use body language to connect

This is the key to having successful conversations with anyone, any time.

**

Review

Leil Lowndes' How to Talk to Anyone offers 101 time-tested hints, tips, and techniques for confidently communicating with others. A bestselling author and renowned communications consultant, Lowndes focuses on ice-breaking skills and communication techniques that are proven successful when making a positive first impression, establishing instant rapport and credibility, and more. Packeed with basic, no-nonsense advice and solid research evidence about which techniques work best in which areas, How to Talk to Anyone show readers how to:

From the Back Cover

"You'll not only break the ice, you'll melt it away with your new skills."
--Larry King

"The ultimate guide to the thinking person ... an invaluable tool for conversations."
--Sally Jesse Raphael

Become a master communicator and succeed in life, love, and business

Have you ever admired those successful people who seem to have it all? You see them chatting confidently at parties and being listened to in business meetings. They're the ones with the best jobs, nicest parties, and most interesting friends.

But wait a minute. They're not necessarily smarter than you or even better looking. What it comes down to is their more skillful way of communicating with other people. Now How to Talk to Anyone reveals the secrets of successful communication. With Leil Lowndes's ninety-two easy and effective techniques, you will discover how to become a master communicator in life, love, and business.

Combining the latest research with Leil's trademark wit and warm-hearted observations of human foibles, How to Talk to Anyone shows you how to:

Make an unforgettable entrance and meet the people you want to meet

Sound like an insider in any crowd, no matter how little you have in common

Use body language to captivate audiences of all sizes

Work a party the way a politician works a room

Always come across confident, credible, and charismatic wherever you are

How to Talk to Anyone , which is an update of her popular book, Talking the Winner's Way (see the 5-star reviews of the latter) is based on solid research about techniques that work!

The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide!

"This is a fabulous book… This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."— Forbes

" Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins

In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth —the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001.

Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life.

Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking.

While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner.

In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

The Must-Have Guide to Humor Writing

Bring on the funny! With Comedy Writing Secrets 3rd Edition , you can discover the secrets of humor writing that will keep your readers rolling in their seats. Learn the basics of joke construction, as well as in-depth comedy-writing techniques that you can apply to a variety of print and online markets. If your aim is to make 'em laughand make a career in comedy writingthen look no further.

In this completely revised and refreshed edition, you'll discover:

• Hundreds of updated one-liners, anecdotes, and bits from top comedians like Louis C.K., Conan O’Brien, Tina Fey, Amy Schumer, Rodney Dangerfield, Jon Stewart, Steve Martin, Ellen DeGeneres, Jimmy Fallon, George Carlin, Zach Galifianakis, Stephen Colbert, Erma Bombeck, and more.
• Exclusive tips for injecting humor into articles, speeches, advertisements, greeting cards, and more.
• New instruction on writing for online markets and social media.
• Advice on brainstorming and editing to beat writer's block and generate new material.
• Exercises and expanded instructions for exaggeration, reverses, word play and more to practice and refine your writing skills.
For more than twenty years, Comedy Writing Secrets has helped humor writers of all skill levels write and sell their work. With Comedy Writing Secrets 3rd Edition , you'll be laugh-out-loud funny and leave readers wanting more.

Bringing out the best in others is good business. When we bring both respect and interpersonal savvy to our work relationships, we do more than make people feel good. We enhance personal and organizational performance. And as the workplace grows more complex and competitive, managing our work relationships becomes even more essential and difficult. Now more than ever we need to work people smart. Working PeopleSmart describes the six core strategies used by people-smart individuals and shows how to apply them in the toughest workplace situations. Individuals who are people smart know how to open others up rather than make them defensive or resistant. They have a knack for diffusing tension rather than creating it. They set a good example through their own behavior on the job and can inspire and influence others with less developed skills. Working PeopleSmart can serve as your virtual coach to guide you through difficult work relationships skillfully. How do you deal with a critical colleague? Make your boss listen to you? React to an offensive joke? Get the resources you need? The authors look at over 50 real-life situations and offer people-smart prescriptions for handling them effectively. They provide coaching tips for each scenario and describe exactly what a people-smart response sounds like. As two psychologists with both organizational and clinical expertise, coauthors Mel Silberman and Freda Hansburg are highly qualified to deliver the message that we can emerge from even the toughest interpersonal moments on the job with dignity and grace. Where other books rely on typologies that categorize people according to their interpersonal styles and then offer advice on how to deal with each type, the strategies described in Working PeopleSmart are straightforward and universal. They can be used immediately to deal with any type of person or any situation, no matter how difficult or sensitive.

Each of us is born brilliant. Then we spend the rest of our lives having our brilliance buried by people, circumstances, and experiences. Eventually, we forget that we ever had genius and special talents, and our brilliance is locked away in a vault deep within. So we settle for who we are, instead of striving for who we were meant to be.

Release Your Brilliance provides the combination to the vault where your brilliance is kept. After struggling for thirty-two years with disillusion, defeat, and despair, author Simon T. Bailey cracked the code to personal transformation, turning his life around and becoming a highly successful entrepreneur, respected family man and community leader. Using the metaphor that we're all diamonds in the rough, Simon shares the four key steps to cut and polish the gem that is you in order to reawaken your genius, reignite your internal light, and release your potential. He guides your transformation with interactive tools such as Personal Appraisal exercises, Diamond Polishing action steps, and true stories of Living Diamonds. Join the thousands of individuals and organizations worldwide who've sat down with Simon and learned to create lasting change and release their brilliance!

Do we have free will? Is the universe compatible with God? Do we live in a computer simulation? Does the universe think?

Physicists are great at complicated research, but they are less good at telling us why it matters. In this entertaining and groundbreaking book, theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder breaks down why we should care. Drawing on the latest research in quantum mechanics, black holes, string theory and particle physics, Existential Physics explains what modern physics can tell us about the big questions.

Filled with counterintuitive insights and including interviews with other leading scientists, this clear and yet profound book will reshape your understanding of science and the limits of what we can know.

Comprehensive guide for comedy writing. Along with a history of comedy and theories about what makes us laugh, the book covers comedy writing in all forms -- sketches, jokes, sitcoms, and feature films.

Ideal guide and textbook.

Latest edition has an additional dozen Appendix pages as well as 50 photographs.

While other books give you tips on how to “write funny,” this book offers a paradigm shift in understanding the mechanics and art of comedy, and the proven, practical tools that help writers translate that understanding into successful, commercial scripts. The Hidden Tools of Comedy unlocks the unique secrets and techniques of writing comedy. Kaplan deconstructs sequences in popular films and TV that work and don’t work, and explains what tools were used (or should have been used).

The book 'How to stop worrying & start living' suggest many ways to conquer worry and lead a wonderful life.

The book mentions fundamental facts to know about worry and magic formula for solving worry-some situations.

Psychologists & Doctors' view:

-Worry can make even the most stolid person ill.

-Worry may cause nervous breakdown.

-Worry can even cause tooth decay

-Worry is one of the factors for High Blood Pressure.

-Worry makes you tense and nervous and affect the nerves of your stomach.

The book suggests basic techniques in analysing worry, step by step, in order to cope up with them.

A very interesting feature of the book is 'How to eliminate 50% of your business worries'.

The book offers 7 ways to cultivate a mental attitude that will bring you peace and happiness. Also, the golden rule for conquering worry, keeping your energy & spirits high.

The book consists of some True Stories which will help the readers in conquering worry to lead you to success in life.

The book is full of similar incidences and narrations which will make our readers to understand the situation in an easy way and lead a happy life. A must read book for everyone.

The most famous confidence-boosting book ever published; with sales of over 16 million copies worldwide Millions of people around the world have improved their lives based on the teachings of Dale Carnegie. In How to Win Friends and Influence People, he offers practical advice and techniques, in his exuberant and conversational style, for how to get out of a mental rut and make life more rewarding. His advice has stood the test of time and will teach you how to: - make friends quickly and easily - increase your popularity - persuade people to follow your way of thinking - enable you to win new clients and customers - become a better speaker - boost enthusiasm among your colleagues This classic book will turn your relationships around and improve your interactions with everyone in your life. Dale Carnegie, known as 'the arch-priest of the art of making friends', pioneered the development of personal business skills, self-confidence and motivational techniques. His books - most notably How to Win Friends and Influence People - have sold tens of millions worldwide and, even in today's changing climate, they remain as popular as ever.

In the present book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie says, "You can make someone want to do what you want them to do by seeing the situation from the other person's point of view and arousing in the other person an eager want.

" You learn how to make people like you, win people over to your way of thinking, and change people without causing offense or arousing resentment. For instance, "let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers" and "talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

" This book is all about building relationships. With good relationships, personal and business successes are easy and swift to achieve.

In the present book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie says, "You can make someone want to do what you want them to do by seeing the situation from the other person's point of view and arousing in the other person an eager want.

" You learn how to make people like you, win people over to your way of thinking, and change people without causing offense or arousing resentment. For instance, "let the other person feel that the idea is his or hers" and "talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.

" This book is all about building relationships. With good relationships, personal and business successes are easy and swift to achieve.

You Will Learn Python 3! Zed Shaw has perfected the world’s best system for learning Python 3. Follow it and you will succeed—just like the millions of beginners Zed has taught to date! You bring the discipline, commitment, and persistence; the author supplies everything else. In Learn Python 3 the Hard Way, you’ll learn Python by working through 52 brilliantly crafted exercises. Read them. Type their code precisely. (No copying and pasting!) Fix your mistakes. Watch the programs run. As you do, you’ll learn how a computer works; what good programs look like; and how to read, write, and think about code. Zed then teaches you even more in 5+ hours of video where he shows you how to break, fix, and debug your code—live, as he’s doing the exercises. Install a complete Python environment Organize and write code Fix and break code Basic mathematics Variables Strings and text Interact with users Work with files Looping and logic Data structures using lists and dictionaries Program design Object-oriented programming Inheritance and composition Modules, classes, and objects Python packaging Automated testing Basic game development Basic web development It’ll be hard at first. But soon, you’ll just get it—and that will feel great! This course will reward you for every minute you put into it. Soon, you’ll know one of the world’s most powerful, popular programming languages. You’ll be a Python programmer. This Book Is Perfect For Total beginners with zero programming experience Junior developers who know one or two languages Returning professionals who haven’t written code in years Seasoned professionals looking for a fast, simple, crash course in Python 3

Who are you?
What have we done to each other?

These are the questions Nick Dunne finds himself asking on the morning of his fifth wedding anniversary, when his wife Amy suddenly disappears. The police suspect Nick. Amy's friends reveal that she was afraid of him, that she kept secrets from him. He swears it isn't true. A police examination of his computer shows strange searches. He says they weren't made by him. And then there are the persistent calls on his mobile phone. So what really did happen to Nick's beautiful wife

Unlock the power of great questions What do you think most engages a prospective client, or makes a lasting impression on someone you’ve just met? The popular belief is that we win business by being clever and quick on our feet, and that our brilliance — saying just the right thing — is what attracts others. But as Power Questions compellingly demonstrates, knowing the right question to ask is actually far more important than having a ready answer. Power Questions can immediately help you win more business, deepen your relationships, and connect with people more rapidly than you ever thought possible. It shows you how to use thought-provoking questions to engage prospects and uncover their most pressing issues. It gives you the tools to get inside the heart and mind of anyone you meet. In thirty-five inspiring chapters, you’ll meet a fascinating group of men and women. Through these riveting, real-life stories, you’ll learn exactly how each power question was used and the impact it had. You’ll discover how you can transform your daily conversations — and even someone’s life — through powerful questions that anyone can master. You’ll learn how Steve Jobs asked a single motivating question that led to breakthrough results in developing the Macintosh personal computer. You’ll see how an unasked question cost a major company a huge project bid. Other powerful examples include: • The question that stopped an angry executive in his tracks • The sales question CEOs expect you to ask, versus the questions they want you to ask • The question that can radically refocus any meeting • A simple question that helped restore a marriage • The penetrating question that can transform the life of a friend or colleague Put these questions to use and you will connect more deeply with your clients, drive quickly to the heart of problems, and unlock your professional and personal influence in unexpected and delightful ways.

Professor Cal Newport presents a multipart argument for deep, concentrated work. He explains that work that demands your full focus is intrinsically valuable and rewarding. You need to be able to handle "deep work" to succeed in an information economy. Yet people face increasing distractions or social pressure that drive them toward shallow work. Newport develops his ideas with a blend of formal research, stories and personal accounts about the challenges and rewards of deep work. He provides tips for arranging your life to support deep work, which he sees as valuable, productive and rare. He makes his case persuasively and even poetically. getAbstract recommends his guidance to knowledge workers and anyone else who is seeking flow, creativity or focus. Book Publisher: Grand Central

An Amazon Best Book of January 2016 in Business & Leadership Pick

One of the most valuable skills in our economy is becoming increasingly rare. If you master this skill, you'll achieve extraordinary results.

Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It's a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep-spending their days instead in a frantic blur of e-mail and social media, not even realizing there's a better way.

In DEEP WORK, author and professor Cal Newport flips the narrative on impact in a connected age. Instead of arguing distraction is bad, he...

Most business books give you the same old advice: Write a business plan, study the competition, seek investors, yadda yadda. If you're looking for a book like that, put this one back on the shelf.

Rework shows you a better, faster, easier way to succeed in business. Read it and you'll know why plans are actually harmful, why you don't need outside investors, and why you're better off ignoring the competition. The truth is, you need less than you think. You don't need to be a workaholic. You don't need to staff up. You don't need to waste time on paperwork or meetings. You don't even need an office. Those are all just excuses.

What you really need to do is stop talking and start working. This book shows you the way. You'll learn how to be more productive, how to get exposure without breaking the bank, and tons more counterintuitive ideas that will inspire and provoke you.

With its straightforward language and easy-is-better approach, Rework is the perfect playbook for anyone who’s ever dreamed of doing it on their own. Hardcore entrepreneurs, small-business owners, people stuck in day jobs they hate, victims of "downsizing," and artists who don’t want to starve anymore will all find valuable guidance in these pages.

From the Hardcover edition.

Give users the real-time experience they expect, by using Elixir and Phoenix Channels to build applications that instantly react to changes and reflect the application's true state. Learn how Elixir and Phoenix make it easy and enjoyable to create real-time applications that scale to a large number of users. Apply system design and development best practices to create applications that are easy to maintain. Gain confidence by learning how to break your applications before your users do. Deploy applications with minimized resource use and maximized performance. Real-time applications come with real challenges - persistent connections, multi-server deployment, and strict performance requirements are just a few. Don't try to solve these challenges by yourself - use a framework that handles them for you. Elixir and Phoenix Channels provide a solid foundation on which to build stable and scalable real-time applications. Build applications that thrive for years to come with the best-practices found in this book. Understand the magic of real-time communication by inspecting the WebSocket protocol in action. Avoid performance pitfalls early in the development lifecycle with a catalog of common problems and their solutions. Leverage GenStage to build a data pipeline that improves scalability. Break your application before your users do and confidently deploy them. Build a real-world project using solid application design and testing practices that help make future changes a breeze. Create distributed apps that can scale to many users with tools like Phoenix Tracker. Deploy and monitor your application with confidence and reduce outages. Deliver an exceptional real-time experience to your users, with easy maintenance, reduced operational costs, and maximized performance, using Elixir and Phoenix Channels. What You Need:You'll need Elixir 1.9+ and Erlang/OTP 22+ installed on a Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows machine.